“Weaker than a wench in childbed!” he growled in disgust.
“I will come tomorrow,” Marco offered.
“Come? No! Until I can talk with you, stay!”
“Stay?” he repeated, disconcerted. “Here, you mean?”
“Where else?” snorted Landry. “Am I to take my life from your hands—and grudge you—a roof and a meal in your belly?”
Marco looked to Rodriga, hurriedly pouring wine for her father. “Of course you will stay,” she said impatiently. He stared at them in something near bewilderment. She beckoned him after her to the stairhead, and called Ramiro to take him in charge.
CHAPTER XI
A guest of their master’s inviting was their guest, and the Catalans accepted Marco without blinking. After supper Ramiro and Pablo asked permission to visit Juan, now convalescent, with the good news of Landry’s recovery. Then Wulfric begged leave for an hour.
Rodriga hesitated, but he looked more troubled in soul than bent on roistering, and he had earned the indulgence. She granted it, sent Esteban to the door and made her evening rounds.
She was in the stable, petting Caliph and Almansor, when a heavy thump sounded at the door, and then a rattle of sharper knocks as someone pounded it with a wooden knife-haft to save his knuckles. Esteban challenged, and was answered by an angry English voice outside. By the time the bar was withdrawn Rodriga was beside him, Marco sprung from the darkness behind her. Wulfric tumbled in, fiercely demanding Pablo, Ramiro and the righting of some wrong.
For a moment she could not make herself heard above Wulfric’s vociferous fury and the questions Esteban and Diego pelted at him. When she pushed between them the Englishman checked in red confusion, his mouth dropping open. Diego and Esteban fell back, and Marco remained at the end of the lamplit passage, forgotten for the moment.
“Be quiet! Will you waken my father? Wulfric, what is amiss?”
“I am going back!” Wulfric snarled. “Back wi’ a spear in my hand to rescue her, and learn that Italian swine to keep his hands off an honest Englishman!”
“What are you raving about? Rescue whom?”
By the wavering light of the little lamp in its niche by the door she saw him draw a hard breath. “The whoreson fleshmonger threw me into the street! Where are Ramiro and Pablo? I am going back with friends behind me, to let out his guts and save my girl!”
Rodriga signalled fiercely to Esteban, who roused from wide-eyed paralysis to slam the bar into its sockets. In his present state it would be well to have the Englishman fast penned inside the house. “Whose guts, and what girl?” she demanded sharply. He breathed noisily and shuffled his feet, angry and embarrassed together, and she guessed at it. “You have been fighting over some slut in a brothel?”
“Fighting? He threw me out—a freeborn Englishman, afore a throng o’ grinning Frenchmen! I am going to burn his whorehouse over his carcase and have out my girl!”
“You will dance on a rope! What shrift will you get from King Richard if you start burning out brothels?” Rodriga snapped, savage with apprehension.
King Richard’s ruling passion, after the winning of Jerusalem, was the maintenance of order, and his methods were brisk and final. Wulfric checked in his frothing and stared desperately at his mistress, and she followed her advantage sharply while his wits were bemused.
“What slut was this, and whose quarrel?” Rodriga was bitterly angry that a man of her household should disgrace it so sordidly, and her voice cracked like a whip-lash. He shuffled sullenly, realising all at once that there was no sympathy for him here, and his youthful mistress was no ignorant demoiselle to shrink from the ugly truth.
“She—it is not as you think!” he protested. “She is not a slut—not of her own will! She was forced—sold to that monster and she cannot escape! All those lustful beasts—and she must—must—” His voice cracked, and he stared at Rodriga as he had done outside the Hospital. “Oh, my lady, have you no pity? A helpless maid, sold into whoredom!”
Rodriga’s anger shifted its focus; it became a hot and generous indignation for all wretched maids in this brutal world of war who found the brothel the only refuge men offered them. She was instantly, wholly Wulfric’s partisan. “Who is this girl, and where did you find her?”
“The House of the Black Girl, my lady. I saw her on the day of the battle. I have gone since, to see her, to talk with her when we could. She is so little and frightened! She must pretend to be gay, or that black brute beats her! And those beasts of men—oh, my lady, how can an innocent virgin like you understand?”
“More than you think,” grimly replied Rodriga, who had witnessed every grimy aspect of military life since she could walk. “But what use to urge your comrades to join you on the Provost's gallows?” That was brutal, but she had to bring him somehow to his senses.
He stared aghast, his face working. “I will go alone!” he cried. “If I cannot save her from that monster I will kill him and hang for it gladly!”
He turned and fumbled with his one hand at the bar. Esteban grabbed at him and was thrust aside. Diego flung himself at his legs from behind, and he fell with a thump. The lamp-flame flared and shuddered, filling the passage with grotesque shadows. Marco came unhurriedly forward as they writhed in one tangle, and Rodriga stood over them in a passion of anger and sympathy, praying that Landry would sleep through the noise. If he learned that a man of his had determined to carry off a harlot from the House of the Black Girl and kill its proprietor he would probably have an apoplexy from sheer fury.
The Englishman heaved up on his knees, with the lads clinging on either side like dogs on a baited bull, and glared up at Rodriga. “I will not leave her—prey for—all the swine in Acre!” he gasped. “I have nothing—to buy her free—but if I cannot save her and wed her—I will kill him and die for it!”
“Wed her?” Rodriga repeated incredulously.
“What else should I do with my little love?” He saw the change in her face as a wild idea came to her. “My lady, my lady, I will serve you all my days and ask no more payment! Only have pity and buy my girl free from Hell!” He clawed at her gown, tears shining in his eyes. “In mercy, in charity, my lady, buy her free!” She frowned, her heart melting for pity and cold dismay weighting her entrails. Mercy and charity were in her, as Wulfric knew, but the man was crazed to insist on wedding a harlot, and she was crazed to think of abetting him. Then shame for her cowardly reluctance scorched her. Her duty was plain. This one victim she must rescue out of the many. Rodriga would have starved in a ditch before bartering her body to every man who pleased to use it, but a woman alone had small choice beyond that and no help from man. And if she refused, Wulfric would storm back to slay Giacomo and end dismally by knife or rope.
“I will help,” she promised crisply. “No, you shall not return to buy her; you would kill or be killed. Get up.” She thought swiftly. This was not to be shared with her father. He was too ill to be troubled with the matter. Also it was most unlikely that he would agree to her outrageous intent, but whatever she did he would abide by. Now she had given her word she was bound. “There is but one thing for it,” she decided aloud. “I must see the girl myself. If she be willing, I will buy her for my service and you may wed her.”
Wulfric and the lads gaped at her, opening and shutting their mouths like new-landed fish. Marco, understanding no English, waited quietly for her to use or dismiss him. Then Wulfric flung himself down to clutch again at her gown, stammering wildly. His protestations of lifelong gratitude were interrupted by a fresh hammering at the door, and they had to admit Ramiro and Pablo and then explain the situation to them when they began asking questions.
Ramiro’s first outraged intention was to lay all before Landry, and only the most urgent representations that he was too ill to be burdened with trouble dissuaded him. Her proposal to buy the girl he flatly rejected, and more eloquence had to be expended before he grudgingly agreed that Wulfric must be prevented from committing murder and being
hanged for it. But there was no winning him to her plan of transacting the business with Giacomo in person. For no consideration whatsoever did a virtuous demoiselle cross the threshold of a pleasure-house or hold speech with its owner. The arrangements must be made by proxy. From that stand he would not budge; if she persisted he would rouse Landry immediately to tell him that his daughter was out of her wits.
Rodriga, who knew her foster-father’s conscience intimately and could recognise an insuperable obstacle when she struck it, allowed herself to be over-ruled, though she carefully evaded agreement or promise. She ridded herself of the Catalans and persuaded Wulfric to wait on arrangements. Having disposed of him, she turned to Marco, who had remained throughout the dispute. Though it had started in English, Ramiro found eloquence in that tongue beyond his power and had reverted to his native language. Marco must have gathered enough from that to make sense of all that had gone before. She beckoned him past the door of the ground-floor room where the men slept, out into the garden, and eyed him speculatively.
“Marco, I need your help,” she said bluntly.
“To bargain with Giacomo on your behalf, my lady?” he asked in an expressionless voice whose flatness somehow betrayed intense repugnance.
“No. To escort me there. I must speak to this girl myself.” That she was determined on above all; she would hear her story from her own lips and no other’s, before she accepted her.
“If it can be contrived without harm to your good name, my lady.”
It was good to deal with a man who accepted her wishes as they were uttered, instead of being certain of his right to controvert them. She waited expectantly, confident in his resource, watching his bent black head as he stared at the scummy pool.
“The last roisterers are usually swept out with the other filth in the morning,” he said at last, “and you must not go by daylight. A moment, my lady; I must ask where Giacomo has set up house.”
He returned after a low talk in the passage. “Better than I expected. I know the house, and it has two doors. Can you contrive an hour’s absence without being missed, my lady? And a heavy veil.”
She slipped up the stairs. Luck was hers; Landry was heavily asleep, wearied by his first day of recovery, and Urraca, lying on the far side of the room, opened a drowsy eye, scowled and closed it again. One lamp of the three had been left burning. Rodriga lay down in her own place until she was sure the old woman was asleep, secured her purse and an old black cloak of her father’s, and then crept out. Marco was waiting at the stair foot, and he did not comment on the length of her absence or ask whether she had come away unseen, which set him apart from all other men she had known. He nodded approval as she covered her head with the cloak and drew its folds over the lower part of her face so that only her eyes peered out from its shadows. In silence he led the way to the courtyard gate and opened it for her.
Outside, the narrow alley between the two high walls was black as the mouth of the Pit, and he caught her right hand. His fingers were hard and steady, his grip light. “Stay close, and if any man speaks to you leave the answer to me, my lady,” he said softly, and led her, stumbling over the uneven littered ground, through the malodorous darkness to the street and towards the harbour. A few yards further on he turned into another alley, moving with a confidence that inspired her own. She had been trembling with some fear and great uneasiness at her rashness, but Marco would not take her into peril from which he could not extricate her. She forgot her dread and yielded to the excitement of the adventure. Once he drew her back into the recess of a doorway to let half a dozen cup-shotten men-at-arms reel by, bawling a song about a routier and a farmer’s wife that regrettably failed to make her blush. Several times they passed dark corners full of whispering and giggles. Once stealthy footsteps padded behind them, and a black shadow flitted across the alley in front, crouched at a corner and whistled softly. Another whistle, and a third, answered from behind. Marco snarled a few words in a strange tongue, the man in front uttered a scared yelp, and the footsteps scuttered away in terror. The night around her was filled with ugly noises; raucous laughter, drunken roaring, squeals and an occasional scream pierced the dull confusion of many voices, strident and conflicting strains of music and song, and the furtive rustlings of human vermin prowling near them in the dark. He brought her unmolested, through a maze of confusing ways and crooked black passages, to a black door set in a crumbling mud-brick wall.
Marco tried the door, which did not budge. He stepped back as far as the narrow alley allowed, a long stride, and looked up at the wall. Moonlight lay in a pallid band along the crest of it, and gave light enough to see that it was the wall of a small courtyard, not that of a building, though a few feet to their right it joined a two-storeyed house that loomed grey against the sky. She too stood back to measure the obstacle, which was some ten feet high.
“Will you climb in?” she whispered.
“Only as a last resort,” he murmured. “Not the best way of recommending ourselves to Giacomo.” He knocked with the haft of his dagger, waited, and knocked again; a third time, and then a fourth. He shrugged resignedly and stepped back again to examine the wall, when there was a stir beyond the door, and an answer.
“Who is there? Go to the front if you seek entertainment!”
Rodriga drew startled breath in a little hiss. Neither a man’s voice nor a woman’s would have surprised her, but that was the treble pipe of a young child. Marco stiffened beside her, and his voice came harshly.
“We seek private speech with Giacomo.”
“I let no one in. Who are you?” asked the child sharply.
“Go fetch Giacomo!”
“Wait there!” commanded the authoritative small voice. Resignedly they waited, and anger hardened in Rodriga at the child’s presence in this house of infamy. She glanced aside under the masking hood at Marco, but in the thick dark of the alley she could barely distinguish the blackness of his hair and beard. Then heavy feet approached, and a band of glaring red light shone through the gap between door and arch.
“Any man who seek me after dark,” growled the great voice she remembered, in the heavily accented Langue d’oc, “come in by the front door if he come honest. I open no door for spear in belly. Who is it?”
“Marco. In peace.”
An astonished silence was followed by the rumble of an Italian oath, and a question in the same tongue that Marco answered shortly. A bolt scraped, and the door swung inward, revealing the vast bulk of the whoremonger holding high a torch. Marco drew Rodriga in, and the door slammed on their heels. The giant’s eyes widened at sight of her muffled figure; they reflected the torch’s red glare under the broad gleam of his balding brow. A chuckle rumbled and his teeth made a third gleam amid the thicket of his beard.
“You take late to whoring, Marco!” he said in his villainous French.
“Private speech with you was our desire, not other facilities!” Marco retorted, and the giant, no longer grinning, moved the torch to light more clearly the renegade’s dangerous face.
“Enter,” he invited. “No private speech here.”
They followed him across a tiny courtyard stacked with casks and boxes and pervaded by the heavy scent of wine, into a low dim room where two old women were cooking over a charcoal fire, and a scrawny female child squatted by them devouring broken fragments. Giacomo thrust the torch into a socket beside the door, took up a candle, patted the child’s shaggy head, and led them through a curtained doorway opposite, through which came thin music almost drowned by a surf-like roar of talk and laughter.
They stood in a narrow passage, lighted only by the little circle of radiance cast by the candle, which made of it a double void of blackness reaching into nothing on either hand. Giacomo scratched his head. “Private,” he said reflectively. “Above we are private, whatever you come for.” He asked no question, and made no attempt to light Rodriga’s face. Perhaps it was unwise to show curiosity about couples who sought privacy under his roof. He l
ighted them up a narrow mud-brick stair and held aside another curtain at the top.
Rodriga found herself on a rough gallery that ran across one end of a long room rather like a castle hall, with beaten earth floor and whitened walls painted with a geometric pattern which was cracked and peeling in places. Her first impression was of candle-light, noise and wine-fumes; then her eyes adjusted themselves, and one glance gave her the whole to keep in her memory: a long table against one wall, loaded with pitchers, cups and dishes; men sitting on stools, benches and the floor; young and shapely wenches, displaying a deal of hair and breast, serving food and wine and laughing as they were slapped and fondled; and at the far end of the hall a small clear space. There a man, an old woman, two younger ones and a boy made music on a lute, a zither, a viol and two flutes that was worthy of a more attentive audience.
Even as Giacomo moved past them to a doorway, the lute, viol and zither sang one loud note that pierced and over-rode the hubbub, and the giant checked, signing to them to listen. Rodriga waited impatiently. The leader of the musicians, the frail fellow she had seen during the battle, was on his feet, and the roisterers hushed as he touched his lute and opened his lips. His song was no lewdness, but those laisses from the Song of Roland in which Charlemagne laments the hero’s death, and his sweet tenor was fit to be heard in a King’s hall. The old, tragic chant came soft and sorrowful through the hush, and when the last note had died in the roof’s murky shadow, no man moved for a long moment. Then the cheering and stamping and clapping crashed to the rafters, and half-drunken men with maudlin tears running down their faces threw coins which skipped and rolled about him. The boy went grabbing and grovelling, but the singer bowed slightly and returned to his seat, where he bent coughing over his lute, and the babble of talk and laughter surged up again.
“His songs are ill suited to the company,” Marco commented dryly.
“I have the music for my own pleasure, not these hogs,” rumbled Giacomo, gesturing largely at the company below. They were above the other sources of light, and no one so much as glanced up at the gallery.
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