The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  ‘But I was raped, attacked! I wasn’t safe. How could I stay?’

  I fear I shouted at poor Jacob, as if he was the one I must convince – while Sara hurried off to bring a stool, and make me sit before I did myself a mischief.

  ‘They must know what Sir Hugh has done? They saw my injuries. My maid must surely have accused him?’

  ‘Master Kempe said nothing of it,’ the old man told me gently. ‘He said Sir Hugh has paid the interest from his funds at Meresfeld, and plans to manage both estates until My Lord the Earl rules on the matter. He said your maid believes you may have travelled north to Lancaster from whence you came.’

  And in the middle of it all, I took a moment to thank Hoddie for that piece of inspiration – guessing that she’d had to keep the peace for Edmay’s sake, and knowing how she must be worrying. I could hardly wait to send for her, but had to. I couldn’t send for Hod until I’d seen the Earl and Countess, and was sure of their protection.

  The Countess came at last in the third week of October, when the leaves of all the oaks outside the town were turning bronze – as was, to my disgust, the skin around my nipples.

  Jacob had it of a debtor that the Earl was to remain in London while the Countess spent her Hallowmas at Lewes. He offered, bless the man, to help me frame my argument. But I had spent too much time on my own up in his attic, not to have practiced it a hundred times, and have it word for word!

  My Lady kept me waiting for the best part of an hour, before she sent down to the castle gate-house, to say that she’d receive me. A page escorted me across two baileys – to a modest third floor chamber in the keep, where the Countess had a chimney-hearth all to herself.

  ‘You say he raped you?’ She turned my statement back into a question. ‘How many times?

  ‘Once was enough, My Lady, for I’m with child and pray he may be punished for the injury he’s done me.’ It was the first phrase I’d rehearsed and caused a murmur of excitement amongst her waiting ladies.

  ‘He did it only once and you’re with child?’

  Seated by the hearth with one dog on a cushion in her lap and two more in a basket at her feet, My Lady’s face when she examined me was frigid. ‘And when exactly do you claim that this occurred?’

  ‘At harvest time, My Lady, Saint Augustine’s week.’

  ‘And how long is it since his wife, the Lady Constance, died?’

  ‘She died soon after Christmas ten months ago.’

  ‘Ten months, as long ago as that? Well we all know what stallions are when they’re denied a mare.’ The Countess glanced around her women, who obliged her with a titter.

  ‘Does that excuse them rape?’

  I hadn’t meant to sound so angry. It wasn’t how I planned to speak. The words came by themselves. ‘You call him a stallion, and the law demands he should be gelded if it’s proven.’

  The Countess turned back to consider me and ask my age. For once without its wimple, her neck was circled with a string of yellow topaz the size of pigeons’ eggs – the skin beneath them positively scrotal!

  I told her I’d be twenty-three next month.

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘And was he able to perform as a man should to validate the marriage?’

  ‘He was, My Lady.’

  ‘And for how long did you share a bed before he left for the croisade?’

  ‘For a little more than five months, My Lady’. Another question I’d expected.

  ‘You lay for five months with a young and lusty man, and conceived no child?’ The passionless, poached eyes regarded me attentively. ‘Yet from a single tumble with Sir Hugh you have contrived to quicken.’

  I said I couldn’t help how it appeared. ‘It is the truth,’ I blurted, stung into incivility again by the suspicion in her voice. ‘Believe me I would not deceive you, Lady. I swear it on my mother’s life.’

  ‘What I choose to believe is neither here nor there – and whether the man forced you once, or fifty times, is immaterial,’ she told me stonily. ‘As is your claim to have resisted.’

  ‘But I DID! I tried to fight him off. He hit me and he raped me!’

  ‘And who was there as witness?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Your word against the man’s?’

  She knows I speak the truth but doesn’t care, I thought – and recklessly plunged on.

  ‘He raped me, and will go on to rape the Haddertun demesne. I know he will if you allow it.’

  She didn’t answer that at once. The whole place held its breath. Then – ‘If you wish to continue with this interview, I would advise you to compose yourself,’ My Lady snapped, ‘and listen carefully to what I am about to tell you. In all appeals of rape, the practice in Crown Court is to establish at the outset if the plaintiff was a virgin at the time of ravishment. In your case, after five months in your husband’s bed, I see no likelihood of that being true. It follows therefore that you have no legal claim against Sir Hugh.’

  I begged her pardon for my ignorance, knowing I’d said too much already. ‘But are you saying that in law, My Lady, a married woman cannot in any circumstance be raped?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  She looked at me with something like surprise. ‘We seal a letter to prevent it being read by those who have no right to do so. But once the seal is broken, there can be no way of knowing who has read it. Or how many times.’

  Between her thumb and fingernail the Countess cracked a flea she’d found behind her lapdog’s ear. ‘I’m willing to believe that in this instance you were forced,’ she acceded. ‘But that will not excuse you in the eyes of other men. We are all women here, and may say frankly that the act itself contains an element of force, as all wives are aware. Men seldom make distinctions between a willing and unwilling woman.’ She sniffed. ‘It comes naturally to men to treat us badly. And since it’s men who make the laws, you may be sure they make them for their own advantage. Which is to tell you once again, you have no case.’

  She didn’t soften it or say ‘my dear’, would never stoop to anything so frivolous. I felt like some poor beast bred only to be chased, caught in the meshes of men’s laws and men’s desires, speared for their sport.

  ‘But what of the Haddertun domain?’ I said in a defeated voice. ‘So is Sir Hugh to have the manor too?’

  ‘The land’s another matter altogether.’

  My Lady’s stern expression and brisk change of manner made it clear that we were talking now of far more serious concerns. ‘Our canon law seeks to protect the land of absent crucesignati. But judgements out of Rome are easier to make than to enforce – and we must face the fact that all our territory across the River Ouse is at risk of incursion by Earl John, who’s brother to the King. My Lord of Warenne is in London at this present to uphold the government of the Queen’s Justiciar against the Earl.

  ‘So it may be as well for the defence of Haddertun,’ the Countess considered, ‘to keep Sir Hugh in place there to defend it.’

  ‘But you’d not send me back there to him?’

  My faith in justice and fair dealing faltered in the face of that unfeeling woman. ‘My Lady, you would not abandon me to one who seeks my ruin?’

  The Countess frowned. ‘What I will send to Hugh de Bernay is an instruction to hold the Hadderton domain against incursion through these unsettled times,’ she said. ‘I will assure him we have every confidence in his intention to uphold the rights of his departed lady’s son, against the day that he returns to claim them. For if he fails to do so, the land will naturally escheat to My Lord of Warenne. I will inform Sir Hugh that I’ve removed my kinswoman, his step-daughter by marriage, into my household for her better safety.’ Again the yellow stare. ‘I trust that satisfies?’

  I curtsied gratitude.

  ‘In the meanwhile you may be interested to hear that King Richard has now taken Acre, and expects to be in Jerusalem by Christmas.

  ‘So by the time your child is born, in April o
r in May?’ My lady’s probing eyes moved from my breasts down to my belly. ‘Well, shall we say by spring – the croisade will most like be over, and our soldiers of the cross returned. With a fair wind we’ll have a king again in England by Eastertide, and I dare swear you’ll know by then if you’re a widow or a wife.’

  The Countess stooped to settle her dog into the basket with the others, and rose to indicate the interview was drawing to a close.

  ‘I think it might be best if I were to find a decent woman, to raise this child of yours for you somewhere away from England. Always supposing it survives the birth,’ she added, brushing dog hairs from her gown.

  ‘But what if I should wish to keep it?’

  And what on God’s earth made me say that, when the offer plainly made good sense? Was it old Sara and the blessings she attached to babies? Or something more to do with the strange stirrings I’d begun to feel each time the little creature moved?

  ‘It is your right to keep it, naturally. But I’d advise against it. As we’ve agreed, men see things differently to women,’ My Lady pointed out. ‘When he returns from the croisade, IF he returns – your husband may insist you’re parted from the child. Which will be all the harder for you when it’s grown.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Pisan Harbour, Acre: October 1192

  CROISADE; THE BITTER END

  More than a year has passed since the pyrrhic victory of Arsuf. King Richard finally leaves Palestine on the Feast Day of Saint Denys early in October, having sent ahead of him his wife and sister and pubescent mistress to make their own way home as best they may. Jerusalem was never sieged, let alone recaptured; and the Kings’ Croisade which began at Vézelay with stirring cries of Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva! – ends on the royal galley in near silence.

  The Sultan Salahuddin’s strategy of harassing and demoralising the Christian armies to the point where they’re too weak to mount another siege, has been successful. At Arsuf he reduced King Richard’s cavalry to less than half its strength. At Joppa and at Ascalon he blocked the harbours and destroyed the towns’ defences to deny them to the Christians. But he left intact the orchards about Joppa as a distraction for their troops. A ploy which proved remarkably effective.

  ‘There were so many grapes and figs, pomegranates, almonds growing in plenty round about, large fruits wherewith the trees were laden, that the host took them without price and were greatly refreshed,’ one Christian annalist recorded. ‘The army remained there long, enjoying indolence and pleasure. Their sins grew daily upon them; whores came to them from Acre to stir up their passions and multiply misdeeds.’

  Hearing from the prostitutes that in Acre the taverns had re-opened, and that ships were leaving daily from its harbours, a steady trickle of defectors began to make their way back up the coast – while outside Joppa, even Richard found time to relax. He went off hawking in the ilex woods behind the coastal plain. He sent to Acre for his wife and sister and the (no-longer-maidenly) Princess of Cyprus, to join him in his orchard camp – and there, to everyone’s surprise, arranged to meet the Sultan’s brother, Sayfuddin al-Adil ibn Ayyub, beneath a flag of truce.

  At a banquet in the royal pavilion, gifts were exchanged and fantastic promises extended. Al-Adil presented the English King with a copy of the Qur’an bound in emerald kidskin, a matched set of seven near-white camels and a damascened campaign tent. In return, King Richard offered his own sister, the Queen of Sicily. If Sayfuddin would but renounce his faith, Jehanne was his to wed and bed, her brother promised with a warm and friendly smile. Then together (and what could possibly be neater?) the pair of them could rule Jerusalem as its new King and Queen!

  But if Sayfuddin, who’s brief was to delay al-Malik Rik as long as possible at Joppa, appeared to see the sense of the proposal, Jehanne most definitely did not. Her fury when she heard of it was said to equal anything their carpet-chewing father could produce. She shrieked that she’d as soon cut off her hand, as give it in marriage to a Moslem. Without in any way intending to be funny, she added that she’d rather take to bed a loathsome, yellow-spotted cacodemon with horns and hooves and a spiked tail worn front-to-back, than a black infidel with a platoon of other wives – concluding with some pertinent remarks about her brother’s character and carnal preferences, that ended turning Richard’s face the same royal purple shade as hers. Meantime, while Sayfuddin pretended to consider the English King’s outrageous plan in Joppa, his brother, Salahuddin, was treating with Conrad in Tyre, for an alternative and smaller Latin Kingdom linked to France.

  By late October, faced with the failure of his own negotiations, King Richard ordered his depleted army to advance on Jerusalem without a realistic hope of taking it. By then the Sultan had destroyed all habitations with their crops and orchards all along the route, polluting wells and watercourses to deny the Christians anything that might sustain them. It took them two months to re-establish a defensible supply line from their base in Joppa, creeping forward to arrive at Christmas at the ruined town of Bayt Nuba in the Judaean hills, just four leagues from the Holy City. But by that time the Christian army were not only blocked by a large force of Muslim reinforcements recently arrived from Egypt, but afflicted by appalling weather.

  ‘Their misery of mind and body was so great that no pen can write nor tongue describe it,’ King Richard’s annalist recorded, before demonstrating that if anyone could do it, he was the man. ‘Their earlier sufferings were nothing to those they now endured from fatigue, rain, hail and floods.’ (Outraged, as men have always been, when adverse weather spoils their plans.) ‘It seemed that heaven itself intended to destroy them. The ground beneath them was so treacherous and muddy that men and horses were hard put to keep their footing, and some sank never more to rise. Who can report the calamities they suffered! The bravest soldiers shed tears like rain and wearied of their very lives! When their sumpter beasts fell in the mud, the provisions that they carried were either spoiled or saturated. And in this manner, cursing the day they had been born, beating their mules with their bare hands, they retreated like roaches from the lamplight to the Port of Ascalon, which they found so dismantled by the Saracens that they could scarcely enter through its gates for heaps of stones.’

  King Richard and his army spent the early spring rebuilding Ashkelon to consolidate their southerly advance, with Jerusalem as unattainable as ever.

  In February, Conrad de Monferrat made an abortive move to annex Acre, assisted by the Genoese and what remained of the French army. In April, things came to a head with news from Normandy that its French neighbours were threatening King Richard’s borders abetted by his brother John. The time for his adventuring in Palestine was running out. The Latin Kingdom was without a king to take his place. The feud between Conrad de Montferrat and Guy de Lusignan was unresolved – and if Richard was to have a chance of reaching Normandy before winter closed the sea lanes and the mountain passes, he had to find a swift solution. So he called a council of the Christian leaders, and simply put it to a vote: Guy or Conrad? Which for king?

  It was a big mistake from Richard’s point of view; tactically huge. For, as before and to a man, they voted for the stronger leader – King Philippe’s cousin Conrad.

  Historians have consistently fudged what happened next, to divert blame from King Richard and his cousin Isabella. So for the sake of argument, let us suppose that I’m a Justice and you’re a knight-juror, sitting in one of the new Crown Courts set up in England by Richard’s father, Henry.

  These are the facts. So let’s suppose that they await your verdict on King Richard and his part in Conrad’s death.

  APRIL 17th 1192. Two days after the leaders’ council votes for Conrad, King Richard sends the Marquess a message that he’s to be crowned King of Jerusalem. The messanger he sends by ship to Tyre is Count Henri of Toulouse – a son of his half-sister, Marie, a grandson of Eléonore and his own acknowledged favourite.

  APRIL 20th. Henri and his embassy arrive in Tyre to give Conrad the g
ood news (and Isabella the bad news that she’s no longer to be sole Queen of the Kingdom, but must herself crown Conrad King in his own right). That April Isabella is just twenty. Count Henri, described as ‘tall and handsome’, is twenty-five. Conrad de Montferrat, who less than two years earlier was forced on Isabella as a husband, is grim-visaged and well past his prime. It’s not recorded that Isabella and Count Henri speak privately. But he stays in Tyre at least two days and has the opportunity to do so.

  APRIL 28th. Isabella leaves her palace for the hamman bath-house at an unusually late hour of the morning. Conrad receives an invitation to dine with the Bishop of Beauvais, but on arriving at his house in Tyre finds that he’s dined already. Riding home, he is attacked by two young men, who stab him in the back and chest. One is killed by Conrad’s escort, the other held for questioning. Conrad himself is taken to the Hospitaller’s infirmary and dies there shortly afterwards. His attackers supposedly belong to a fanatical sect of religiously inspired killers known as hashishiyun (the prototype for all future ‘assassins’). But the dead assassin is recognised as a servant of the young Queen’s mother, while the other has been seen in Isabella’s own household.

  APRIL 29th. French troops camped outside Tyre demand admittance to the city. But Isabella locks the gates and sends a message to Count Henri, then in Acre, to the effect that she and the Latin Kingdom are at the disposal of his uncle, King Richard. At the same time it’s rumoured that, under torture, the surviving assassin confesses he was hired by Richard – an accusation bitterly contested in the King’s Itinerarium.

  ‘Oh infamous and malicious envy that always carps at virtue, hates what is good and endeavours to blacken the splendour it cannot extinguish!’ protests its loyal author.

  APRIL 30th. Count Henri of Toulouse returns to Tyre, and is reported on arrival to have been admitted ‘at night’ by Isabella.

  April 31st. A hasty betrothal is announced between Queen Isabella and Count Henri.

  MAY 9th. Henri and Isabella are married a bare eleven days after Conrad’s interment. Isabella is already pregnant with Conrad’s child. But they still consummate the union – to the disgust of the Muslim, Muhammad ibn Hamed Isfahani, who’s present at the wedding.