The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  By then we knew our King had signed a treaty with the Sultan. But what happened in the world beyond the walls of Ashkelon was of less matter to us at that time than the great walls themselves. We worked all day out in the sun, squint-eyed. We carried, rolled and levered building stones until our skin took on the colour of tanned hide, our hands its leathery texture. Worked anywhere that we were needed – even took our turn in treadmills lifting cranes. Then in the evenings while the sun sank back into the sea, we stood together in our filthy, sweat-soaked clothing, John and I, to admire the rising lines of dressed and interlocking blocks, dyed indigo in shadow, crimson where they caught the dying light…

  But wait. I have forgotten something earlier, much earlier than that!

  John found it growing in a crevice of the old foundations of the Moslem wall. A bird-borne seedling from some garden which had long since disappeared beneath the ash, he knew it from the blossom as the rose he’d watered by Khadija’s pool – and took a deal of trouble to uproot it, tend it for me, plant it in an earthen crock.

  And although he never voiced it in so many words, I understood the point that John was making: ‘If a rose can grow out of a ruin, so can you and so can I.’

  The truce between the King and Sultan was set to last three years, three months and three days, on the sound principle that a thrice-ravelled rope is the most difficult to break; and long crocodiles of troops trekked north throughout that final summer, in the hope of taking ship from Joppa or from Acre before the autumn storms.

  By the beginning of September, the outer walls of Ashkelon were near complete. Without their scaffolding, they rose sheer thirty foot from skirted glacis to crenellated parapet, reflected in the waters of the moat to seem still higher. Massively unyielding, voluptuously curved between stiff ranks of barrel towers retreating into distance, we saw them as our gift to Palestine. Something salvaged, something positive that we had made with our own hands to leave behind us.

  So when they told us that by the terms of our King’s treaty with the Sultan, the walls of Ashkelon were once again to be destroyed – and when we saw the first stone crash into the moat and sink from view – we knew that it was time to go.

  BOOK FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mmm, yes. What a relief! It isn’t until you squat to use the pot, that you know how much you needed to!

  He’s still asleep, my little lamb. You’d think he’d wake, the moonlight through the window is so bright – and surely will at any moment now to start bawling for his feed!

  My son was born in the first hours of May, on Garland Day, while the monks of Reigate Priory were still on their knees for Matins. The birth was an ordeal of cramping pain, from which there’d seemed to me no possible escape – until the baby came, and I began to think I wouldn’t die.

  ‘A boy, no doubt of that lamb the way the nipper’s tackled ’pon my soul!’

  Hod’s triumphant face appeared above the midwife’s, somewhere down between my knees. To be followed in the shortest time by something even more surprising. And that’s the first part of the wonder of becoming a new mother. It makes no sense when you have cursed and carried him for so long, then worked so hard with so much pain to push him out into the world, that you should be in any way surprised by his arrival. Yet I was totally astonished!

  When Garda showed me her first baby, he was already tucked up in his cradle looking halfway civilized. But what I saw when I first beheld my own son in the dim light of the birthing chamber, was a pagan little creature with a bright puce face and lardy fluid smeared all over him. When Hoddie lifted him onto my pillow, he waved a pair of scrawny arms, pulled puny legs with strangely purple feet in tightly to his belly – then opened an enormous mouth to tell the world in no uncertain terms how furious he was with it!

  So very small, so very cross – one moment something alien and agonising. An obstruction that had made me call for help from any saint who might be listening – the next an autocrat in miniature, shouting for his own attention!

  I stared at him in utter disbelief.

  I smiled at him. I almost laughed at his outrageous masculinity!

  I’d planned to have a girl whose life and mine would be the easier if she were valueless to anyone but me. But when I saw my son, I fell in love with him completely. There was no question. He was mine and I was his, and would be for as long as we both lived. He was my reason for existence.

  All through the winter months at Reigate, while other people’s sons and husbands staggered home from the croisade with injuries that ranged from simple disillusionment to missing arms and legs, I spent my time parading possibilities for my own future (and quite a few impossibilities, besides!).

  In the last month of my confinement, when I looked like a sow about to farrow and waddled like an eggbound duck, the Countess sent a guard in Warenne livery to Haddertun, to fetch my Hoddie to me for my lying in – a kindness I thought remarkable. The man was told to offer no more explanation to Sir Hugh than that the tirewoman, Hodierne, was needed by her lady. And when the poor thing finally arrived – to find me almost circular, round as a herring tub – it had been hard to tell from her exhausted face if Hod was glad or sorry.

  ‘To say the truth I wasn’t sure myself if I should be made up with you for showing ye could catch a swollen belly,’ she told me afterwards with a wry smile. ‘Or fearful for ye lamb for catching it the wrong side of the blanket, an’ from a famous knave.’

  Which hadn’t stopped her telling me who he was like, when she had cleaned me up and they brought back the baby to be fed. ‘See ’ere’s the varmint’s nose stuck on the child.’

  She pointed with a bony finger. ‘Pore kiddy only wants a suit of clothes an’ something of a beard, to be ’is father’s spit.’

  ‘Nonsense, how dare you say so. He isn’t!’ I said sharply. ‘He’s nothing like him!’

  But he was, however I denied it.

  In those first hours it was incredible how a tiny, gummy scrap could so exactly replicate a grown man with a head of hair and a full set of teeth – although I’m glad to say that after that first shock of recognition, my son began at once to change into himself. However others see it, he’s unlike his father in every way that counts – and ever will be, if I have aught to do with it!

  Although he seemed so strong, they took him to the castle chapel for baptism while I was still confined – and most approved the Christian name I’d chosen, Hamelin, in honour of the Earl. My Lord of Warenne was abroad in Kent to help defend its seaports against a possible invasion by Earl John. But My Lady came with two of her own tirewomen to see me with the child.

  ‘Well, in the scale of things, when we are presently unsure which prince will rule in England,’ she declared, ‘Another chance-born child is neither here nor there.’ (Which came a little rich from her, I thought, considering she’d married one!) My Lady Isabel had looked so stern and cold, that I was taken by surprise again when she reached out a heavily-ringed hand to stroke my baby’s head.

  ‘Helpless creatures. I never cared for mine until they walked,’ she told her ladies. But I’d swear I caught a momentary softening of her hard mouth as she looked down upon my son.

  As for me, I couldn’t get enough of little Hamel – loved nothing better than to feel his weight, the heat of his small body pressed against me. With every day that passed he seemed to me more perfect, from his minute, shell-pink toenails to the silky hair that fringed his crown. I loved him, loved him as much I believed it possible to love. Yet now I love the rascal even more!

  What I loved then when I first had him, was the warm baby smell of his soft skin – the new sensation of him snuffling for the nipple whenever I unlaced my bodice, tugging like a piglet to draw out the milk. And when he cried, I couldn’t wait to lift him from his cradle and unwind his swaddle bands, to hold him close where he belonged.

  ‘’Tis best to let him cry awhile before ye feed him, Lady,’ the midwife advised. ‘Belike he’ll need a strong voice as a man
, an’ here’s the way to breed it. And Lady, ’tisn’t right to loose the bands so regular,’ the stupid woman said. ‘For one, he needs ’is legs kept straight to set the bones whiles they’re still soft – an’ for another, a child who’s spent a ninemonth in the belly still wants a tidy bit o’ swaddlin’ round him. The last thing he needs, ye may believe, is freedom from his bonds.’

  But I did not believe her. I was convinced that I knew better than she ever could exactly what my own child needed. And what I knew he needed was the feeling of his mother close against him, and not the hard wood of a cradle – needed to feel my beating heart as he had felt it from the first. To know that he was safe and I was there, and always would be to protect him.

  ‘An’ who’s to say that ye’ve not got the right sow by the ear,’ Hod unexpectedly agreed.

  ‘I loosed your bands an’ all, whenever your Maman weren’t looking – ’tis more’n likely why ye’re such a blessed fidget now.’

  Dear Hod, how I had missed her!

  In his first weeks of life, my little Hamelin grew steadily in size and strength. His narrow slate-blue eyes began to open wider and to follow mine. Until one day while I was telling him how beautiful he looked, and cooing at him like a lovesick turtle, the blue eyes sparkled in a way they’d never done before and his pink mouth produced a gummy grin.

  And it was then in the enchantment of my son’s first smile, that I began to see what Mary Mother had wanted for me all along!

  When Garon bedded me that second time, I’d thought that I was all grown up, a finished woman. Then, when I failed to keep him back from the croisade, and when the Blessed Virgin failed to save me from Sir Hugh, I felt that she’d abandoned me completely – when all the time it had been ME who’d failed to understand, or see that she’d planned all along for me to share the miracle of birth and all the joys of motherhood! I’d been a child myself – I saw that in my son’s first smile – expecting to direct my own steps through life.

  By early summer, the Reigate castle sewers gave notice in their usual noxious fashion that it was time for My Lady and her household to decamp to Lewes, and the fresh air of the Sussex downs.

  We’d heard by then that King Richard had been captured by the German Emperor on his way home from Outremer. We’d heard My Lord of Warenne was in Saint Albans with Queen Eléonore, to uphold her government against the intrigues of Earl John, and help her to accumulate the ransom that the Germans were demanding for the King’s release.

  But what cared I for kings and queens and princes? Or for absent husbands bound on fruitless quests? The Countess told me that the Old Queen was demanding a quarter of the income from everyone’s estates to go toward the ransom of her son. She told me that in Garon’s absence, his stepfather must pay – not only for the Manor at Meresfeld, but for my Haddertun as well. And serve the bastard right, I thought!

  Meanwhile my little piglet child grew fat and rosy. His cries when he was hungry shook the castle, and when he’d sucked me dry, he filled his padded napkins with a bright, egg-yellow cack that made him near as lethal as the sewers we were to leave behind us!

  Hod called him ‘Stinky-Hamkin’. But if the stink was easy to discard with his soiled linen, the changes to his name began to stick – and by the time we left for Lewes, he was most often known to Hod and me as ‘Hammy’, ‘Ham’ or ‘Hamkin’ – or some other nonsense of the kind.

  Garda always said a baby was more fun and far less trouble than a husband, and she was right!

  The long day’s journey south to Lewes was the same we’d made almost four years before, when I had come to marry Garon. Except that this time we rode in style within a curtained litter – not near so splendid in appearance as My Lady Isabel’s, but plenty fine enough for Ham and me. (And although they slow things down to walking pace, and lurch about when bearers change, I’ll swear there’s nothing to compare with litters as the best means on God’s earth of getting babies off to sleep!)

  We departed at an early hour to put a league or two between us and the castle drains before the sun gained too much heat. For the first stretch of the journey I lay propped on a pillow in abandoned fashion, with Hamkin latched to one breast or the other, and the curtains of the litter open to let in the light. The Countess could never understand why I must feed my own child instead of taking on a wet nurse. But once I had embarked on dairy work – and even after Hamkin gummed my nipples raw – I would not have another woman acting as his milch cow for all the treasures of the Indies!

  We had already left the sandy heaths that lap the south side of the Surrey hills, before my little leech had filled himself to bursting (and pungently beyond it!) and fallen senseless from the breast. Birch trees by then had given place to oak and beechwood. Butterflies danced all along the wayside. Swallows swooped about our caravan, flashing their white bellies. Everywhere the peasantry were busy with their hay. (Until we gave them an excuse that is, to down their tools and run to see the Countess with her furnishings, her cage-birds and her little dogs.) The children were the worst for begging alms, hanging from cart sides and yelling like mussulmen until My Lady’s Marshal judged his chance to fling them the loose coins she kept for her largesse. To leave the urchins scrabbling for pennies in the grass while we passed on our way.

  They called a halt for dinner by the river, in the lee of Ashdowne Ridge – and set up a trestle with a canopy to shade the Countess from the sun. We sat with backs to trees, or perched on tussocks while we ate. But My Lady had a cushioned chair as if in her own hall – with linen and plate silver, and sweet malmsey wine, and slices of cold beef to feed her dogs.

  With little Hamkin cleansed, topped-up with milk and sleeping off the effort – I walked beside the litter when we started off again, to stretch my legs and shake my dinner down. Hod plodded on behind on her safe riding mule, fanning her face with a green burdock leaf, and commenting on all she saw along the way – a flock of sheep, a donkey foal, a fallen oak, more sheep, the monks’ drawers bleaching on the grass at Hatchgate, a charcoal burners’ camp – and long after I’d crawled back into the litter for the climb up to the ridge, I could still hear her voice advising the poor litter men of every point of interest in the way ahead.

  The main problem, the chief disadvantage of the journey, was that our road to Lewes had to cross the sandy stretch of Meresfeld Heath, a straight crow’s flight from Ashdowne – and Meresfeld was the last, the very last place in the world I wished to see – with living in its bounds the very first man on this earth I wanted to avoid!

  ‘Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, if in your wisdom you can find a means of keeping him away,’ I prayed, ‘I swear I’ll light a candle at your altar in the fortress chapel each morning at the hour of Tierce.’ And all the way from Nutley Cross to Cackle Street, I begged the Lady of All Goodness to lend an ear to my best thoughts on how we might avert a meeting.

  ‘You might send Sir Hugh to Haddertun to see their hay brought in? Or confine him to his chamber with a summer fever?’ I suggested.

  ‘Or, Dear Mother of Christ, have you considered that if he heard the Countess and her retinue were crossing his domain, and rode in haste to meet us… well then, his horse might stumble on a hidden branch or something of the sort. It’s likely in the circumstance, that kind of accident. And when a horse comes down it’s not unknown for riders to sustain the fracture of an arm – or of a leg? Maybe even of the skull…?

  ‘Dear Holy Mother – you know, who better, of the injury that man has done me. Is it too much to ask, for him to break his wretched neck?’

  It was too much as it turned out, or else too unimportant as a detail for the Mater Dei to attend to. Because he came! And worse! He came exactly as I prayed he wouldn’t – when Countess Isabel was seated at her supper in the shelter of a sandstone bluff on Meresfeld Heath – with me in plain view at her side!

  ‘She says to say that ye’re expected at ’er table,’ Hod had whispered through the curtains of the litter to save waking little Hamkin. ‘An’ shor
t of dropping dead, there en’t no way for you to tell ’er nay.’

  He brought his daughter with him mounted like a lady on a white Welsh pony – although still child enough to wave excitedly and call my name, before her father frowned her into silence. He had shaved off the beard I’d always so admired, and actually looked better for it. Dressed all in red, as he had been when I first saw him in the fortress bailey, he seemed as he always seemed, in confident control.

  The Countess’s guards drew round her, and her little dogs barked wildly as he leant forward to dismount. For months I’d dreaded seeing him. Now after the first glance I made a point of smiling past the father to the child – with both my hands clenched underneath the cloth to stop them shaking.

  Sir Hugh uncovered to make some kind of an extravagant salute. ‘My Lady Isabel, I see you are in health.’

  (That voice, that mocking voice! ‘Please what? Please spare me your uncouth attention? Or please to use me like a bitch on heat, knowing I’ve been begging for it this twelvemonth?’)

  ‘Sir Hugh?’ In the act of rinsing her long fingers while a page held back her sleeve, My Lady Isabel acknowledged his obeisance.

  ‘I bid you welcome Lady to your lands of Sussex.’

  ‘I hear you Sir, but misdoubt your welcome will be quite so heartfelt when you’ve understood my errand.’

  She raised her voice so all should hear what I already knew. ‘I come at the behest of My Lord the Earl of Warenne, as overseer for collection of the ransom for the King’s release. I am in Sussex to demand from all our vassals a fourth part of the income from their holdings – in your case, Sir Hugh, from the land hereabouts which you hold in the right of Lady Constance, and from that within our ward at Haddertun which you uphold still for her son.’