The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

(There’s violet muscadin to sweeten breath, if only I can find it.)

  And past time to reward the poor man – as I should have done a month ago if I’d been less of a pigheaded prune!

  Impossible that she could sleep through all that lusty howling. And she hasn’t – sitting up against the pillows with her hair about her. Smiling.

  The boy’s so small and helpless. So trusting in the way his little hands cling to my robe. When he is older, if he lives, I’ll take him on my horse about the manor to show him all it offers. Wherever he has come from, he’s a child to guide towards a better future – as my father might have guided me. If he had lived.

  ‘He’s hungry, let me have him.’

  A pair of white hands reach into the moonlight, take the child.

  ‘You’ll find a rush light on the sill, and flints if you can work them.’

  Her voice is soft without the jagged edge. But for the moment I can’t see her face.

  I manage at the fourth attempt to make a flame. The silver of the moonlight turns to gold; to pink and gold. And I’m rewarded with another smile. She’s naked with one marbled breast already suckling the child, the other swollen, carmine-nippled – doing likewise for my eyes. Woman about her natural business as a mother.

  I watch her, fascinated.

  The small boy works with the determination of the man to come, another Hugh.

  He’s finished. Flushed. Fluffy-haired – already dropping off to sleep.

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then are you going to take him back, and then return yourself? Do you want to, Garon?’

  A question in no need of a reply. A scent of violets in the air. And I’m the ram who wrinkles his white nose to savour what he’s fought for. She sees it otherwise as I turn from the cradle.

  ‘You’re panting like a hound.’

  ‘I’m not.’ (Not yet.)

  ‘Then I suppose it must be me.’

  Seven words, to smash the lock and fling the door, and fling her arms wide open. But still too soon, too soon to take, with so much first to give…

  How could he know? Where has he learned to use his hands this way?

  IMSAK, the joy of waiting… My love is lark song, heart song, Lark flight, soaring, mounting, panting and proclaiming. Waiting for the surge to lift us and engulf us.

  ‘Aaah – careful of my foot!’

  Which surely is the moment to let them get on with it, now they’re together in the here and now, and poised for a new future?

  Too soon to go? I don’t agree. They have their own new time to make, and so do you.

  No really, I insist. If I can turn my back on what they’re doing (please don’t use that word, it’s inappropriate), then so can you.

  Except that I’m as bad as Garon. I forgot the rose!

  It didn’t die in the frosts of Biella, or in the alps, or anywhere on his long journey home.

  He planted it – a rooted stem with six or seven slender branches – in Elise’s palisaded garden by the manor stairway. It put out more shoots that spring, to flower two years later in June of 1196 (the month in which construction was begun on Haddertun’s first fulling mill, down on the mudsquelch). After that it bloomed unfailingly each summer, forming scarlet rosehips in the autumn in bold defiance of the English climate.

  My Lady Isabel was given cuttings; and in due course of time, the rose’s progeny spread clear across the south of England.

  Would you believe it if I told you we’ve a number of them here in our own garden at the farm?

  EPILOGUS

  1196 -1867

  Bullies. We hate them. Don’t we?

  Then what of Alexander, called The Great? What of Napoleon, called Le Grand? Doesn’t history tend to back the winners, bullies who succeed; admire celebrity, however selfishly impelled? We talk of confident, aggressive men, even of women with those qualities, as having ‘balls’. Which would suggest that it’s testosterone, virility, that makes a hero of a bully – a tendency to find the clash of arms, the sound of detonations, the sight of blood, envigorating?

  And our King Richard, as a case in point? We call him Lionheart for his courage (as no one is recorded to have done in his own lifetime, incidentally). Great-hearted hero? Or a heartless bully? It shouldn’t be too difficult to spot the difference.

  King Richard returned from the Holy Land a finished hero, to bring to heel his traitorous brother, John; pausing only in a leafy glade of Sherwood Forest, to bestow an Earldom on the outlawed Robin Hood, before riding off into the sunset of English history as our nation’s best-loved medieval king.

  Come on, you know as well as I do that is nonsense!

  King Richard sailed from Acre in the autumn of 1192, to make landfall eventually on the Adriatic coast near Venice, and travel overland (as bad luck, or lack of sense would have it) through the territory of his slighted ally from the siege of Acre, King Philippe’s cousin, Duke Leopold of Babenberg; the very man whose banner Richard’s followers had cast into the city moat.

  The King and his small group of followers were dressed as common pilgrims. But it’s likely one of them was not all that he seemed. The records show that Leopold was told by an informant exactly where to find him, and even how the King of England was disguised; and speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that Sultan Salahuddin learned of his enemy’s arrest outside the city of Vienna in the bare time it took his pigeons to fly down through Asia Minor to Damascus.

  The reason given by Duke Leopold for the King’s imprisonment was his belief that he’d betrayed his Christian allies by ordering the murder of Conrad de Montferrat. But it’s untrue that Richard spent long years in German dungeons. Because, in less than fifteen months, we find him kneeling at the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral – to thank the God that he so often cursed for his return to England. During his detention by the Duke of Austria and his liege, the Emperor of Germany, he’d been escorted westward from one comfortably appointed castle to another, growing ever fatter on German pastries and Rhenish wine: ‘Drinking and sporting,’ his annalist recorded, ‘with the young men they set to guard him’.

  Meanwhile, the Emperor proposed to sell the King of England to the highest bidder. A ransom of one hundred thousand marks was first agreed with Eléonore his mother and her agent, Bishop Hubert Walter. But the King of France, in league with Richard’s brother John, promptly offered half as much again for his custody or further detention in the German Empire; and in the end, Queen Eléonore was forced to raise one hundred and fifty thousand marks to pay for his release. (A jaw-dropping sum, amounting to nearly thirty-four tons’ weight in silver; the highest value placed on any man in our recorded history, and one which virtually bankrupted England.)

  Worse still, in further payment for his freedom, the King of England blithely pledged allegiance to the Emperor, Heinrich. In other words he made a gift of something neither the Kaiser nor the Führer were able to beat out of Britain in two world wars – to make this kingdom part of Heinrich’s German Empire.

  But then Richard never did care much for England – had never heard of Robin Hood (who wasn’t to emerge out of the greenwood, if he emerged at all, for at least another century), and wouldn’t have approved of funding outlawed peasants in any case. When it came down to it, he spent a bare eight weeks in England after his release. Just long enough to add a British leopardé guardant to his lion escutcheon, and to frustrate his brother’s hopes to wear a crown – before he crossed back to the Continent to pursue a new war with King Philippe for control of Normandy and the dower lands he held illicitly for Philippe’s jilted sister.

  It was in this last phase of his life that Richard built, for his defence of Norman Rouen, the Château Gaillard; a fortress famous for its strength and beauty – to satisfy, perhaps the one and only constructive aspect of his character, and illustrate the paradox (as he had done when he rebuilt the Palestinian towns of Acre, Joppa and Ashkelon) that even the most destru
ctive men can be creative.

  To manage England in his absence, he left behind him Hubert Walter – who had by then assumed poor Baldwin’s role of Primate; and was never to set foot again on English soil. The previous year, while he was still a prisoner in Germany, Richard’s old adversary, Salahuddin, died quietly of pneumonia.

  The Sultan passed into the peace and mercy of Allah in Damascus, surrounded by the weeping women of his harem. He was buried in a simple wooden coffin in a kiosk in the palace gardens; and the emir, Baha-uddin Karakush, who had been spared at al-Ayadiyeh, put into words what all his mourners felt.

  ‘The world is filled with so much grief,’ he said, ‘that God alone can measure its true depth.’ And after the passage of eight centuries, the man whom we call Saladin is still admired, as much for his nobility of character, as the brief glory of his Arabian empire.

  King Richard’s own death six years later was consistent with so much of his career, in that it was vainglorious and violent. In the year 1199, during a truce in his territorial war with France, he was addressed directly from the pulpit of the church of Neuilly-sur-Marne, by a courageous curé who ordered Richard in the name of Christ to set aside his three corrupt and shameless daughters.

  ‘By God’s throat priest, you know I have no daughters!’ the lion king’s reputed to have roared out from the nave.

  ‘You have My Lord,’ the curé told him with the moral courage of a Becket or a Baldwin. ‘Their names are Pride and Avarice and Lust!’

  It was not the first time since his return from the crusade that a cleric had reminded Richard of the weight he’d laid upon his soul by sinning in the style of Soddom and Gommorah, or had rebuked him for sexual preferences which by comparison with patricide, infanticide and genocide might seem to modern eyes the very least of his infringements. But I have to tell you it was Avarice, not Lust, that killed him.

  In March of that same year 1199, a peasant ploughing in the Limousin near Châlus turned up an impressive Roman treasure trove of golden artifacts and coins. Half of it was offered by established custom to the King. But half was not enough for Richard. Ignoring Lent with its unhelpful traditions of penance and humility, as ever spoiling for a fight, he rode at once with a full company of horse and foot and a platoon of sappers, to siege the castle of Châlus-Chabrol and take the treasure’s other half by force. A forge-hammer to crack a nut? Well what would you expect?

  The little garrison consisted of no more than two or three armed knights, and forty peasant bondmen with their families and livestock, who’d taken shelter in the castle when they heard an angry king was on the warpath. For protection they had nothing more than cloth or leather, and were so ill-equipped, we’re told that one man had to use a frying pan as a rough shield.

  Predictably, at the end of three days of intense bombardment, the castle’s pathetic garrison offered to surrender for their lives. But Richard had already sworn to hang the lot of them. And in just the way that a real hero wouldn’t, he killed them without mercy – men, women and small children.

  All but one.

  In the final hours of siege, a young arbalester on the battlements contrived to wound the King whilst he was making one of his theatrical appearances before the literally captive audience in the castle. The biographers who still insist on seeing Richard as some sort of medieval cricket captain would have us believe that he applauded (‘Oh, good shot!’) before summoning the surgeons to attend his wound. The quarrel had missed his vital organs. But the King by then was more or less rectangular. So by the time they’d cut down though his body-fat to extract the missile, the outcome was inevitable.

  We’re told the arbalester shot again at Richard after he was dragged into his presence. This time with words.

  ‘You have already killed my father and two brothers,’ he’s reported to have said. ‘So take your revenge on me in any way you like. Now that I’ve seen you on your deathbed I am ready to endure it.’

  Legend credits the royal hero with a chivalrous decision, not only to forgive the boy for shooting and defying him, but to reward him for it with a fortune; a hundred silver shillings. But all we know for sure is that the arbalester was saved – not actually from hanging, but only from the privilege of hanging in his skin. Because they tied the poor boy to a cart’s tail and subjected him to the agonising death of having the skin flayed from his still-living body, before hoisting what was left of it to hang beside his father and his brothers on the gallows.

  Do I believe from what I know of him, that wasn’t on the orders of the dying king, who’d learned the art of flaying prisoners in Palestine? Do you? In any case, the crossbow quarrel carried shreds of dirty fabric deep into the wound – to start the gangrenous infection which was to take eleven days to kill the King.

  He died in early April, before the Easter festival – coincidentally on the very Tuesday Garon and Elise of Haddertun’s fourth child was brought into the world.

  After his death, King Richard’s bearded chin and all his servants’ heads were shaved in preparation for his funeral. His horses’ ears were sliced, their tails were docked. His mother came, flint-faced with grief, to see him on his deathbed. Queen Bérangère preferred to stay away. By usual custom, a wax impression was taken of the royal features. The remainder of the Body Royal was first eviscerated and then divided – and you may be sure that there was plenty of it to go round!

  King Richard’s blood was sent to Aquitaine, his brain and liver to Poitou, his heart to Normandy, his bowels to stay within the Limousin where he was killed. The rest of him was soaked in frankincense, wrapped in a white-crossed cloak, stitched into a bull’s hide, placed in a coffin sealed with lead and buried at his father’s feet in Fontevraud. For England, which had paid so handsomely for his release and bound itself to Germany for his return, there wasn’t so much as a pared toenail.

  So King dead, end of story? If only!

  Dissection first, then distribution; and finally in course of time for Richard – resurrection! (Not as he’d been in life, you understand, but as something considerably finer.)

  In London’s Hyde Park, at the western entrance of Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, a huge three-times-life-sized plaster statue of the Lionheart on a prancing Fauvel was erected – to prove that you should never underestimate the power of glamour. It showed the King in his (imaginary) prime, muscled like a wrestler in lycra-tight linkmail with sword upraised in triumph. All who passed beneath it understood the sculpture to stand for everything that was aggressively colonial, patriotic and indestructibly heroic in Victoria’s great empire; King Richard in the image of Saint George.

  Nine years later, cast by then in bronze and largely paid for by public subscription, King Richard’s statue was re-erected in Old Palace Yard outside the Houses of Parliament, to become the most unlikely champion of democratic principle that you could possibly imagine. And there he still sits, flourishing his sword; a crusading warrior whose bloodthirsty idea of justice is even now associated with our kingdom in the Middle East. On one side of his statue’s plinth, a bas relief shows Richard on his deathbed forgiving his assailant. On the other he is mounted and in battle, at Joppa or Arsuf. (The bodies of eviscerated women and beheaded children have been tactfully omitted.)

  And why, one has to ask, is Richard still there in his monumental pride of place outside Westminster Hall? Apathy? Because it’s easier to ignore a thing than change it? Or ignorance?

  ‘We still think of him, you know, as one of our great heroes.’

  Either would be bad enough as motives. Worse would be to think that we are honouring a bully, sanctioning negotiation with a naked sword. I’d hate to think he’s there to justify our willingness to go to war in countries where the word ‘crusade’ has once again become a byword for violent Western intervention. I like to think, like Garon, that we’re capable of learning from our past mistakes.

  But back to the Victorians and Richard’s legend.

  Fuelled by Sir Walter Scott�
�s romances (and that heroic statue), by 1867 the Lionheart’s mythic power was such, that the Empress Queen herself petitioned the French government to send to England from Anjou King Richard’s chalkstone funerary effigy, which she’d been told the French were not maintaining as they should. The French response was to decline, while surreptitiously touching up the paint on the old image. So to this day, the likeness, which Queen Eléonore commissioned, can still be seen in the Abbey Church of Fontevraud. It shows her son as she intended, as staggeringly handsome – tall and slim with the heroic visage of a god and all deformities of physique and character removed.

  Her own effigy lies close beside him with an open prayer book, and a smug expression on its face.

  A third likeness of King Richard, evidently modelled from a death mask, may be seen in Rouen Cathedral on the tomb which covers Normandy’s share of his body; Richard’s heart. It wears what seems to be an oriental crown, and shows a short-necked and balefully unpleasant-looking man with beetling brows and a pugnacious downturned mouth. The heart itself – the legendary ‘coeur de lion’, described as twice the size of any normal man’s – still lies beneath; and when in 1838 an inquisitive historian was licensed to exhume it, he found the famous organ wrapped in linen in a crystal box within a leaden casket and holding still to a material form.

  But then the truth wrapped in clean linen, as my Elise maintained, is still the truth; and time by then had shrivelled Richard’s heart to something black and leathery, and really RATHER SMALL.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to Clare Christian of Red Door Publishing and Elaine Sharples of typesetter.org.uk for invaluable help with this novel. I am indebted to Dr David Abulafia, to Dr Paul Brand, and to Christopher Whittick of the East Sussex Records Office for the many useful clues they supplied to help me find my fictional path through the medieval labyrinth; also to Mr Whittick for his original translations of Archbishop Baldwin’s Latin tracts and sermons, to Enid Nixon for access to contemporary details of King Richard’s coronation, to David Skinner and Mr A. North of the Victoria and Albert Museum for help with my researches on Greek Fire, to Mebrak Ghebrewelhdi and Simon McLaren of Vandu Language Services in Lewes for access to translators, to Abdel Rahim, John Kinory and Marcella Marzona, respectively, for editing my Arabic, Hebrew and Piemontèis quotes and depictions, to Mohammad Talib Ali for his insights into Islamic culture, to Stephen Bamber for helping me to live with my curiously temperamental computer – and as ever to my wife, Lee, for her unfailing support, her perceptive comments, her skill at spotting literal errors and for her general forbearance. I asked her repeatedly if she had the patience to see me through the horrendously selfish process of writing another novel, and amazingly she had.