The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  ‘Bravo! Your father would be proud of you. I am.’

  The Bérgé smiles. ‘So would you say that in a night spent leafing through the pages of your past, you’ve seen the consequence of what you’ve done, and can begin to think of building something from the wreckage?’

  Léonie, free of his embrace and on her feet now busy with her cheese curd, looks down to search my eyes, but doesn’t speak.

  ‘I know I have no one to blame for my misfortunes but myself, if that is what you mean? And no one to rely on but myself to set things right.’

  ‘I only asked to hear you frame it in the words I knew you’d choose.’ (Which is good as admitting he can read my mind.)

  ‘You couldn’t know what I would say, not word for word!’ If I can hear the bluster in my voice, he must as well. ‘I mean how could you know?’

  ‘In the way I always have – and if you don’t believe me, I will tell you what you’re thinking at this moment, and what you have decided. You’re thinking you need peace, security and love. You feel a need to make something, to see things grow. You need another chance to understand your wife and show her how you’ve changed. In other words you’re ready to go home.’

  He’s rising to his own feet, holding out a hand to pull me onto mine.

  ‘And before you say it, Garon – you’re about to ask me if I can find time to show you the shortest way to the San Bernard pass – and I am about to tell you that I’m at your service. Unless Léonie has more food to cram into your belly, we’ll leave this moment if you like.’

  So now he’s pointing down the valley to the road which rises through it to the the Hospice on the mountain pass. The tracks we’ve ridden have been steep and difficult in places, even for the asses’ little hooves.

  But now I am dismounting, to leave my donkey in his care – telling him I never could have found my way alone (and of course I don’t just mean the way up to the pass). My thanks are heartfelt, and for once I can express them. Because that is something else they’ve given me, the Bérgé and Khadija, the words to say what’s in my heart.

  ‘Can lost time ever be made up?’ My final question.

  ‘It doesn’t need to be. We make time as we live it.’

  He hands me cheese and mutton from his satchel for the journey, rests a paternal hand a moment on my shoulder.

  Our eyes meet and we smile.

  I set my foot with care upon the narrow path, to climb back into the world I’d left behind me – knowing that the figure on the donkey will watch me until I’m out of sight.

  I feel his pale sea-coloured gaze and turn to wave.

  SORTILEGUS

  ‘We make time as we live it.’

  He treads the narrow path with care to climb back into the world he’s left behind him. He won’t make a slip, not now, and knows I’ll watch until he’s out of sight. He feels my eyes on him. I let him turn to wave – as once he waved at poor Elise, before I made him ride away from Haddertun and everything he knew.

  The colour’s fading from the mountains. From Garon’s viewpoint my mounted figure gradually grows smaller, sinks into shadow.

  Alone, I stare, no longer at the alpine landscape or the Valle d’Aosta, but at the final sentence on this screen. My donkey creaks – becomes a donkey-coloured swivel chair. Which means I’ve lost it altogether, damn it!

  Where’s my coffee cup?

  Oh WHAT?

  Now surely somewhere in that last chapter, or in the one before, you started to see through my nameless Bérgé and his suspicious take on life? (Including more than one illicit misquote from Shakespeare, incidentally, who wasn’t to be born for another 370 years).

  Surely you suspected that the Bérgé has a name, and that it’s printed underneath the title of this book?

  If on the other hand you caught me cheating with my possibly-too-modern Flockmaster, but overlooked the fact to let yourself read on, you may be cross with me for breaking cover, playing games?

  But do be fair. You know as well as I do that novels by their very nature involve pretence on both sides– and you play games as well, you know you do. Can you say honestly, with hand on heart, that you have never skipped or skimmed, or dipped, or jumped ahead in books to see what’s happening a little further on? Or worse, peeked at the ending? Or fallen fast asleep with me still in the bed (it happens)! You may have left me on the train? Or changed my font size, made me bigger? Shown me to your friends?

  So tell me, while I give my reading specs a wipe, why I shouldn’t be allowed a little break myself after the hard slog of writing all those sheep and shepherds up into the alps? It’s not as though you haven’t heard me speak directly to you elsewhere in the novel. I’ve used my own voice from the start – in the PROLOGUS and the Coronation chapter, and in every other passage representing ‘history’ as I see it. I’ve even asked you for a judgement on King Richard in the matter of Marquess Conrad’s assassination.

  Nor am I by any means the first author to engage his readers in this kind of dialogue. John Fowles did it in The French Lieutenant’s Woman – and so of course did an earlier Victorian generation of ‘dear reader’ novelists. Jane Eyre steps from the pages hand in hand with Charlotte Brontë. And not just once, but continually until the final famous: ‘READER, I married him,’ with READER in capitals.

  In any case, who sets the rules? The reader or the writer? And who’s to say what’s real or isn’t once you have begun to read?

  But why at this point, SORTILEGUS?

  Well, a sortilegus in the Latin is a seer, a kind of clairvoyant who can, as Garon has discovered, read others’ minds and tell their fortunes. In which capacity (if you’ll bear with me for just a little longer?) I have a point to make about my characters before we put them through their final paces. Which is that they’ve the same capacity as we have, you and I, for learning from experience – that I’m convinced twelfth century people acted and reacted much as we do; could be as cynical as you and me, as cheerful or as pessimistic. Don’t ask me to agree with academics versed in the writings of cloistered monks, who use such phrases as ‘the medieval mind’ to describe unfeeling patterns of behaviour. Because in saying that, they sweep aside the gentle and forgiving beliefs of the Albigensian pacifists of medieval Aragon and Catalonia, Gascony, the Languedoc and Piemonte (as did the Catholics in their inquisitions), and they ignore the freedoms exercised within the medieval city states and communes of maritime and subalpine Italy, Dalmatia, Flanders and the Rhineland.

  It’s frankly sickening to hear military historians describe atrocities in terms of ‘medieval mind-set’. As if that phrase provides some kind of an excuse. As if all medieval Christians were programmed to forget the things their Founder had to say of tolerance and forgiveness.

  Put it another way. Would you call Hitler ‘medieval’? Or Stalin? Or Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Mugabe or Gaddafi – or any other modern tyrant? Or our own obtusely genocidal British High Command in the Armageddon of the First World War, who counted casualties like cricket scores with three or four noughts added – who sent nine hundred thousand young men to their deaths in Flanders and the Middle East, rather than negotiate for peace when opportunities presented? Were they all ‘medieval’?

  I’m sorry but I don’t believe you need a modern education to understand what kindness is, or love, or loyalty, or forgiveness. I see those as inherent qualities – not necessarily Christian, or even human ones – which can survive all periods and faiths. Just as, unfortunately, those other natural traits of thoughtless imitation, greed, intolerance, blind fear and the reactive violence it can lead to, are resistant to all efforts to expunge them.

  In many things we’re individual, in much else the same. Ask anyone who’s made a study of wolf packs, bonobos (or alpine marmots, for that matter), and I think they’ll tell you that without the benefits of education or religion, those animals have all developed disciplines, moralities to help them to survive. Have meerkats changed essentially in their behaviour since the twelfth century?
Has Homo sapiens? I don’t think so.

  ‘We can never fully understand the medieval mind. We would do well to hesitate before we blame the men of a different and in so many ways a better age.’

  That is a quote verbatim from King Richard’s admiring biographer of 1933 in defence of that medieval king’s decision to slaughter three thousand bound and utterly defenceless men, women and small children on the Plain of Acre. Another more recent writer uses Latin, in tempore gwerrae: in time of war to excuse the inexcusable. A third attempts to let King Richard off the hook by pointing out that in his time the concept of war criminals had yet to be invented (and what a cop-out that is!).

  So much for modern writers. His own contemporary, the French Bishop of Beauvais who laid the death of Conrad at King Richard’s door, described him as: ‘a man of singular ferocity, of harsh and repulsive manners, subtle in treachery and most cunning in dissimulation.’

  But I digress – and more about my bête noire, Richard, in the EPILOGUS at the end. Let’s just say here that his chief role so far as this book is concerned, has been to help define its actual hero, Garon. So what I’m saying by extension, and why I’ve interrupted both of us to say it, is that, even as a ‘medieval’ character, my Garon is as capable of reformation as any modern man – although I will agree it might have taken him a little longer without the Bérgé’s intervention. And if you think of him as nothing more than a figment of my imagination, I have to tell you that from where I’m sitting at my desk, his character is actually more real to me than yours, the readers’.

  Poor Garon, cast from the beginning as a follower, an imitator, too little a free-thinker. Poor faulted hero, induced by me to look back on his life through one long summer night high in the alps (which – sorry, yes I tried to trick you into seeing as some kind of a celestial perch beyond the grave). Poor pilgrim, forced through every physical and mental trial I could devise for him – including what we might now term post-traumatic stress, and a disquieting sense that he was being scripted – to arrive at last back in the present in a more hopeful state of mind.

  Which rather begs the question of whether I have left enough time – in what? Three chapters? Four at most, to bring things for my hero to a reasonable conclusion.

  And what would you call reasonable? Should I let Garon triumph in the end, like David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or Lucky Jim? Does real life ever work that way? Is ‘happy ever after’ no more than a traditional convention? Or do I owe it after all to you, dear reader, considering the time you’ve put into this book, to do my best at very least to tie up the loose ends?

  And then, what of Elise? It’s been a while, too long perhaps, since she reported on her latest brush with that archetypal, almost mandatory, black villain of romantic fiction – Sir Hugh de Bernay. Where would Elise be now? In bed at Haddertun? (I think I’ve made it clear that she’s in bed there at some point of her narrative.) But where will we find our heroine if we fast-forward six months, to the spring following her husband’s shepherding adventure in the high alps? At Lewes still? Is that where Garon will discover her at the end of his long journey home? (IF he gets home?) She can’t be under the protection of Earl Hamelin, because the records tell us he was in Canterbury that March, assisting with the celebrations for King Richard’s long delayed return to England.

  But maybe Countess Isabel is still in Lewes? If she is, it’s more than it likely that we’ll find Elise, with little Hamkin and her faithful Hodierne, somewhere in My Lady’s household where they’ll be safe from Hugh.

  Elise has changed as well of course, a great deal since the early chapters…

  But look, I’m sure you’ve had enough of all this introspection. So if you’re with me still, and haven’t thrown this at a wall – shall we get on?

  It’s a little tricky, this next bit. But if the brain’s in gear, I think that I might manage half a page before it’s time for lunch.

  So… a last swig of tepid coffee from my favourite mug (it’s chipped, but I still like its sturdy shape), a last look through the window of my office, across our own fields to the blue line of the Sussex downs (with somewhere underneath them, incidentally, the prototype for Haddertun, a little less than four miles distant as the swallow flies from where I’m sitting now).

  Then back to my old steam-driven Dell Computer, and to Elise.

  And okay let’s say she is in Lewes, in a shared bedchamber somewhere in the fortress.

  Let’s say she’s just received a summons to attend the Countess in her solar…

  THE WHITE CROSS, BOOK FOUR

  Centre for the chapter heading...

  and on to CHAPTER SIX

  ‘My Lady, you are bidden to attend the Countess Isabel, and if you please to bring the child.’

  It was the message I’d awaited, delivered by the page-boy, Thomas, from the door of our women’s chamber in the fortress.

  That day, I’m thinking of THAT day! How long ago? Six weeks or seven – it doesn’t seem that long – and, Holy Mary, how can so much happen in a single day!

  He hasn’t woken, isn’t ready for his feed, may even hold out long enough for me to think through everything that happened on that day, and all that followed.

  My feather bed’s so comfortable, so warm beneath the covers…

  ‘It’s getting cold outside,’ young Thomas offered on his own account. ‘I think Ham better wear his woollen gown.’

  A child himself of seven summers at the most, he’d shown an interest in my little Hamkin from the first. On Sundays and on evenings when the Countess freed him, he was ever in our chamber, to see how we fed and dressed our little boy. To play with him, and try to make him laugh.

  ‘Tommie!’ As soon as he clapped eyes on Thomas, Hamkin dropped his leather skittle ball and wriggled round to face his friend – his soft cheeks creasing into dimples, his fat little arms held out for an embrace.

  ‘Good morning!’ he shouted happily (the two words that Ham loved best and used at any time of day) – struggling to pull himself upright on Thomas’s silk tabard and hug him round his spindly knees.

  ‘Now Master Tommie, don’t ye try to lift ’im now ’e’s grown so big.’ Hod flapped about them like an old grey goose. ‘Jest bring ’im ’ere then, there’s the boy, for ’im to ’ave ’is breeks changed.’

  ‘There won’t be time, you’ll have to come!’ The little page was bursting with excitement. ‘Sir Hugh of Bernay’s with My Lady, and you know she can’t be made to wait.’

  I carried him myself down to the inner bailey, across the empty court and past the kitchens to the banquet hall – with Thomas trotting at my heels and Hod, who had refused to be excluded, bringing up the rear. The sun lit the white blossoms of a thorn tree growing hard against the bailey wall. But I felt nothing of the hope it should have brought me, knowing what I had to face.

  ‘Donkey!’ Hamkin pointed to the stags’ heads high above him in the empty hall, when I halted to shift his weight. But although Hod offered to relieve me of it, nothing would persuade me to hand him over. Not then or on the stairway to My Lady’s solar – nor ever in the future!

  I hadn’t seen the villain since we passed through Meresfeld back in June. But the Countess had informed me of his visit to the fortress three weeks later, to pay his dues on both the manors – and to petition for her judgement in a case against me. My claim of rape, he said, must prove our carnal knowledge of each other – and then (the brazen-faced presumption of the man!), he’d put it to My Lady that since all could see I was uninjured, my right to redress for a physical assault could be no stronger than his right to claim the boy as his own son. He even had the face to offer marriage, for pity’s sake, as soon as Garon’s death could be established. As if he would be doing me a favour by raping me as often as he chose! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, instead of dismissing the black devil out of hand, the Countess told him it was not for her but for My Lord of Warenne to judge the case. She held that while the Earl was off abroad collecting funds to free the
King, Sir Hugh would have to bide his time.

  ‘But My Lady, don’t you see that you’ve encouraged him to think he has a case?’ I blurted when she told me what had passed – and earned myself a sharp rebuke for speaking out of turn.

  ‘The man is doing all we could expect of him.’ My Lady’s tone was cutting. ‘He oversees your husband’s manor in his absence, and has moreover paid the quarter ransom dues on both demesnes. Sir Hugh informs us that he’s willing in addition to repay Sir Garon’s croisade loan when it falls due at Michaelmas, and in the meantime offers you a home and status as his wife.’

  ‘But he raped me and abused me, and now intends to steal my child!’ I wailed.

  ‘Are you disputing that the boy is his?’

  What could I do but shake my head. ‘Well then. I’ve told Sir Hugh that until My Lord’s at liberty to pass his judgement, he is forbidden to attempt to see you or the boy. For which security I would expect you to be grateful?’

  My cue to curtsy. To thank My Lady humbly for her favour, and then remove my person and my problem from her presence.

  But if we had been free of Hugh’s attentions for the eight months that passed since then, I knew why he’d come now. The Earl had not returned to Lewes in the autumn or in winter, but had travelled with the old Queen into Germany instead, to pay the Emperor the ransom he demanded for the King’s release. In Lent the Countess came south again to Lewes – only to hear that Eléonore and Richard, with the Earl in train, were already on their way back home to England.

  I heard the rest on a visit to the Jews’ house with my little boy, to demonstrate to his admirers Hamkin’s newfound skill of walking, holding hands.

  ‘On Saturday your King and Queen made landfall, Lady, at the port of Sandwich,’ I was told by Jacob, who always had the latest news. ‘Next week they come to London, where My Lady of Warenne will join them for the King’s crown-wearing at Westminster.’