‘Yust sitting.’
Lief had taken up residence at the Swan. One day he hadn’t lived there and the next he did. Nobody had remarked on the change, so natural a progression did it seem. The man never seemed to initiate anything, yet gradually more and more responsibility accrued to him so that he had begun to attend staff conferences, without any permission being sought or given. Blat said he was a tower of strength and Finn had sniffed: ‘Tower’s right. We could squeeze two more customers into the space he takes up.’ But she had shifted so much reliance onto the big Norwegian without realising it, getting him to represent her with agents and merchants who didn’t want to be seen dealing with a woman, that she could no longer get rid of him.
She bent her eyes on her primer. ‘I need you to take me to Bristol tomorrow.’
‘Sure.’
‘And then to Brittany.’
‘Sure.’
She was becoming crosser. His presence always made her feel physically little, like ivy against a tall tree. ‘But if you’ve got business of your own, I can manage. Aragon can take me. We’re not reliant on men here.’
‘No.’
‘They’re not reliable animals.’ She looked towards him, wondering why she was saying things she hadn’t meant to say.
From the shadows his eyes were straight on her. ‘You’d been my lady,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have left you.’
He saw her go slack, all the courage she’d kept up for too many years gone out of her in a second. He got up and went over to her, put his hands under her armpits, lifting her like a doll to carry her up to the tower where for that one night the middle room was neither cold nor terrible.
She was furious the next morning, all her fight returned, ashamed of how vulnerable, how feminine, clinging, wet, responsive and generally stupid she’d been the night before. She felt, oddly, like an adulteress. ‘It was an aberration,’ she yelled at him, ‘and don’t you presume on it. It didn’t mean anything. I was just… not myself. Do you hear me? You can go and never come back. Do you hear me?’
‘Sure,’ said Lief, ‘We still catching the tide for England?’
‘Yes.’
* * *
The Plantagenet court with its hundreds of clerks and courtiers moved around the palaces of its empire in turn, using up the food of each area, hunting through its coverts, transacting its business and then moving on, leaving behind it an army of indigenous servants to catch their breath, clean the rooms, empty the sewers and generally get ready for the next visitation. There was often little warning of the court’s arrival and none at all of its departure. Frequently its impatient king arrived ahead of it, would stay in a fury of business for perhaps a month while the court caught up with him and then, one morning, all hell would break loose as he announced their departure for the next stop.
When Finn arrived in England it was to discover that the court, which had been at Winchester, was now at Westminster. Fitzempress, she was told, was away and the queen was still acting as his regent in England. She knew she was taking a risk that Eleanor might recognise her, but the risk was small. The queen had met Boniface, a very young nun, her hair scraped back and hidden under the Fontevriste wimple. She was unlikely to see Boniface in the older woman who had been through so much and who wore her hair round her face in the Irish style.
Lief had refused to stay behind in Bristol. She had commanded him to – his presence making her uncomfortable – but he had taken no notice, so together they rode through the pleasant west country of England to Newbury where they embarked on a boat which landed them on the watersteps of Westminster Palace.
It was a bewildering place, one of the biggest royal residences Finn had ever seen, bigger than Chinon and not nearly so beautiful. The various kings who had occupied it since Saxon days had all added bits to it in the style of their particular age so that it ran for over a quarter of a mile along the north bank of the Thames like a ragged, architectural calendar. Its courtyards were crawling like wasps’ nests with petitioners, hawkers, entertainers, and stallholders. The Great Hall itself, which William Rufus had inconveniently built at a point where the river could flood it at exceptional tides, was not now the feasting place of kings, as he had intended, but doubled as a permanent court of justice and a chancellory where litigants could purchase the king’s writs, no longer having to chase all over Europe after the royal presence to acquire one. Fitzempress was centralising his new law.
Lief’s height and Finn’s Irish mode of dress attracted stares and questions from the men and women who milled around them, and giggles from small boys. Eventually Lief smacked one of the latter and paid him a half-penny to take them to the queen’s section of the palace.
Finn sighed with relief when they came to it; even in this hotchpotch of a place Eleanor had created beauty. At the west end of Westminster, beyond the great cathedral, as far as possible away from the encroachment of the city of London, she had built a smaller palace among gardens which ran into each other through archways in walls of rose-red brick. As they neared it bustle and traffic faded. At a lodge under a willow tree by a stream, they asked for Muirna, gave their names and waited, hearing the sound of a lute coming from a pleasuance further in.
Muirna cried with pleasure at the sight of them and flung her jewelled arms around Finn’s neck. She had changed. To the court she was still very much an Irishwoman, exotic and foreign even among that cosmopolitan collection of peoples. ‘Eleanor calls me “Lady Erin”,’ she told them. But to Finn it was apparent that she had absorbed the manners and sophistication of Eleanor’s world, if not its values. She maintained an Irish mode of dress, though it was even richer than the one they had sent her off in, she spoke Norman French with a deliberate Irish lilt, but these things were her way of asserting her personality in a world crowded with personalities. Otherwise she walked with the slow sway of Eleanor, laughed and talked with affectation, batted her kohled eyelids at the male courtiers who pretended to swoon as she came among them, just as Boniface had seen Eleanor do.
She interpreted Finn’s glances and became defiant. ‘I’m one of her regular ladies-in-waiting now,’ she said, ‘I’m fond of her. But I’m still a hag.’
Finn didn’t want to waste time. When they’d exchanged greetings and news, she said, ‘I want to meet the Exchequer clerk. I want a copy of Fitzempress’ seal.’
Muirna’s jaw dropped. ‘And how about the moon while you’re about it? He’ll never do it.’
‘He will. He’s taken the first step in betrayal by showing you Laudabiliter. I’m going to force him to take the next.’
Among her web were double agents – the smith at the crossroads to Chester was one of them – and in turning them she had gained insight into Duckweed’s methods; once a victim could be blackmailed or persuaded into treachery, however minor, he was his controller’s agent for life.
‘Are you sleeping with him?’ she asked Muirna bluntly.
The Lady Erin smiled with pity at her naivety. ‘It isn’t how it works. Courtly love is for the unattainable; he just likes to moon over me.’ She added, ‘I may take a lover here, but when I do he’s not going to be anyone as minor as a clerk.’
They walked through gardens where peacocks strolled among exquisitely-dressed courtiers, the men often more exquisite than the women and, with their short tunics, showing a great deal more of their person. Finn’s eyes bulged at the bulges. Every so often they stopped while Muirna introduced Finn, ‘May I present my friend, the Lady Hibernia?’ As Bevo had reported, everybody seemed to be mooning over somebody else, the young men draping themselves at the feet of their ladies and either murmuring poetry to them or singing their beauty.
‘Oh come on, Finn,’ said Muirna as her friend’s mouth pursed tighter and tighter. ‘Confess that this is an advance on the way women are treated everywhere else, even Ireland. At least this give us status.’
Finn hadn’t thought of it like that. It was true. Outside this daisy-chain garden women were discounted, mere r
eceptacles for male seed, or work-slaves, or child-bearers, or heiresses to be bought and sold. Here, perhaps for the first time, Eleanor had insisted that womanhood be placed on a pedestal. But was it any more realistic? Weren’t women still objects being hymned for the luxuriance of their hair, their white breasts, their delicate hands and not for who they were?
She felt a touch on her foot and looked down to find a young male courtier fondling the end of her shoe. ‘Give me the right to compose a sonnet to your wonderful eyes,’ he moaned. She gave him a kick; ‘Get off.’
Had she realised it, by the time they reached the centre of this romance, Eleanor herself, her face was expressing all the deprecation it had shown years before when Boniface had first been introduced to the Queen of England.
‘Madam, may I present my good friend, the Lady Hibernia,’ said Muirna and Eleanor, extending a languid hand, found herself wondering where she had seen those dark-blue disapproving eyes before. ‘How nice,’ she said.
She too had changed. Her youth had gone in childbearing, though instead of losing her figure she was almost too thin. The contentment that Boniface had seen had given way to dissatisfaction; Eleanor was an intelligent, dynamic woman who was being eclipsed by her more dynamic husband, and forced into being merely a figurehead of a queen instead of the ruler she had hoped to be and was capable of being. Frustrated, she had made herself the centre of a world of culture, but it was still an artificial world.
There was a feast every night in Eleanor’s palace; at least two hundred people, a mixture of officials, courtiers, visitors attended it if they wished. It welcomed too many foreigners, Christian and even Islamic, for Finn’s presence to be questioned. In the crush she seated herself between a man and a young woman and wondered why Muirna, who had been pushed to the other side of the vast table, was making frantic faces at her.
The young lady at her right turned to her. ‘Shall we exchange names? We haven’t been introduced. I am Lady Isabel, wife to my lord of Llanthony.’
For a moment Finn stared straight ahead. Muirna spread out helpless hands and shrugged. Slowly Finn looked round at the woman her lover had married. ‘I am Hibernia,’ she said.
‘Ah yes,’ said Lady Isabel, ‘You come from Ireland, I hear.’ She shivered dramatically, ‘all that ice and snow.’
‘That’s Iceland,’ said Finn, and took a deep breath. ‘They’re easily confused.’
If the Pilgrim had informed his wife that he had ever been in Ireland, he hadn’t told her anything about it, and that warmed her. More warming yet, as Isabel chattered on and on, was the revelation that he shared very little of his life with her. He had spent enough time in her presence to give her two sons – Finn heard a lot about the two sons – but most of the time he was away ‘on the king’s business. He’s one of the king’s marshals, you know.’
Finn studied the girl – she was still in her late teens – as she talked. She was extremely pretty, very blonde, well-born, and a complete bore. She kept the ball of conversation firmly in her court all through dinner, happy to enlarge on her estates and family as if Finn were familiar with them, never questioning Finn herself, content with her world of babies, stewards, servants, castles and a husband who rarely came back to interfere with any of them. The jealousy, which had shot through Finn like a poison, dissipated. She told herself she was almost sorry for the two of them, locked in a marriage which had so little partnership of minds. But she wasn’t. She was hideously glad. She was exultant. She could have stood up on the table and shouted, ‘He does not love her.’
She was ashamed at her joy. ‘God damn the man, it shouldn’t matter to me.’ She consoled her conscience because Lady Isabel didn’t mind it, had no idea that partnership of minds between man and woman was possible. And the Pilgrim had got what he wanted, presumably; from everything Isabel was saying his position in the king’s administration was high.
‘But you wouldn’t think so sometimes,’ chattered Isabel, ‘for only two months back – we were up in Chester in our castle on the marches – he came home of a sudden and he was in rags, would you believe. Rags, as if he were impersonating a beggar.’
‘Why?’ asked Finn. What was a king’s marshal doing dressed in rags in Chester, when the king and his army were in Aquitaine?
‘I don’t know,’ said Isabel, ‘He never tells me anything.’
* * *
The next morning Finn and Lief rode across the bridge over the river Tyburn and into the forest beyond it to keep the highly secret assignation that Muirna had arranged for them with Robert, the clerk from the Exchequer. Finn had refused to allow Muirna to accompany them. ‘It isn’t going to be a nice interview,’ she said, ‘and I want you to remain his object of affection. Better keep out of it.’
Robert was waiting for them in a glade. He was young, pimply and nervous. When he doffed his cap to Finn she noticed his tonsure, but apart from that sign of his clerkship, he had attempted on an obviously limited budget to dress like a young courtier. His short tunic appeared to have been made out of cheap red cloth by his mother, and there were holes in his hose. He was disappointed at not seeing Muirna and became fretful, though he looked with alarm at Lief.
‘I don’t know you,’ he said, ‘I’m going back.’ Lief stepped forward and Robert decided to stay where he was.
‘Young man,’ said Finn, taking a large purse from her sleeve, ‘I’ll get to the point. I have here some wax and I wish you to make an impression of both sides of the king’s seal for me.’
It took time to sink in, then the clerk’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re mad.’
‘No,’ said Finn, ‘I’m rich. I’m offering you ten gold pieces,’ – she showed them to him – ‘one now and nine when you deliver the impressed wax back to me.’
Robert was pale, but his eyes were on the gold. ‘It’s death,’ he said, ‘I can’t do it.’
‘You’re an Exchequer clerk,’ said Finn, coldly, ‘you use the seal one hundred times a day. Use it one hundred and one times today and bring it to me here this evening. If you don’t, I shall let it be known that you have been copying the king’s private records.’
Also death. Finn watched the boy sag at his bony knees and thought, ‘What a wonderful thing it is to fight for your country and blackmail young English lads.’ But she’d got him: she knew it and he knew it. The gold piece passed.
Finn’s voice became harsher. ‘And while you’re about it, I want to see the account of expenditure incurred by the lord of Llanthony. You need only show it to me, you can take it back with you tonight.’
Miserably the boy nodded. They could only hang him once.
* * *
It was a long, nervous day. If the boy was caught he would talk, and even though he didn’t know who she was he would be able to point her out. Just in case, and to give herself the chance of escape, she borrowed Muirna’s headdress, which was of the latest fashion, and had a strip of veil attached to one side which could be brought over and attached, to cover the lower part of the face, a compliment to Eleanor’s crusading days. Muirna said it was a ‘yashmak’.
She could take no interest in what was going on around her, the games, the entertainments, the continual and, eventually, irritating drone of the love songs. ‘Extend your contacts,’ she kept telling Muirna, ‘we must know more of what’s going on. Try and encourage Becket’s rebellion.’
Muirna said: ‘He doesn’t need encouraging. He’s turning half Christendom against the king.’
And then, in the late afternoon, a man came in through the gate and strode across the lawn to where Eleanor was picking cowslips, bowed to her and said, ‘From Aquitaine my lord king sends greetings and his heart’s love to his queen.’
Eleanor’s voice saying, ‘My lord of Llanthony, how nice,’ became the twitter of a far-away bird, the royal English garden became an island in an Irish lake. Finn, sitting on a stone bench, leaned against the yew hedge behind it until its spikes went into her skin and stayed still. Muirna, who had been sitting
beside her running her fingers over her harp, leaned over and tugged the yashmak across Finn’s face. She got up, and crossed to the other side of the path. ‘If he comes this way, I’ll distract him.’
I don’t know what to do, thought Finn, I just don’t know what to do. She felt too weak to move and her soul bounced up and down between heaven and hell to find each unbearable.
She heard Eleanor say: ‘And what a pity that your lady has gone falconing, towards Smithfield I believe. Is the king well?’
‘I’ll see her tonight,’ said the lord of Llanthony perfuntorily, ‘Yes, lady, he is well.’
There was some more conversation which Finn’s ears buzzed too loud to hear. ‘At least he’s been in Aquitaine,’ she thought, ‘which is where a regular king’s marshal should have been. He’s going to come this way, he’s going the other way, it doesn’t matter in either case, oh bugger him.’
He was walking in her direction and she was on a bench. The years rolled away so that it was Boniface who sat there. She didn’t look up, just heard his footsteps coming closer along the gravel. She would recognise him among millions, how could he fail to recognise her even though she was veiled?
He was level, and looking at her. Then she heard the sound of Muirna’s harp ripple into sound. Playing the first tune she could think of to distract his attention, panicking. Muirna had picked on a song by Niall of the Poems. Would he recognise it? Would he recognise Muirna? No, he’d only seen her once, and that in the dark.
The tune hit her with memories, and it hit him. She felt him stop, knew that his guts were twisting, just as hers were.
After a long time, with both of them an arm’s length away from each other, she heard him say, ‘Where did you learn that tune?’
Daughter of Lir Page 34