The Lute Player (52 page)

‘Well, good-bye,’ I said. ‘This has been a most interesting conversation. And this belt, I must remember, came from Vienna.

‘That is so, lady. Peter picked it up in Vienna—besides, I recognise the workmanship.’

And so, to my sorrow, do I, I thought as I turned away. Before supper that evening I found myself alone with Count Egidio and Sir Stephen. I had spent the day pulled this way and that by indecisive thoughts. Berengaria had certainly said that Richard had worn the belt when he left Acre to take ship for England but she had set herself a course of intentional deception and it was just possible that she had lied. The belt might have been sold even in Cyprus. I knew Richard to be quite capable of taking it and expressing his gratitude even as he assessed it in terms of money. It might have reached Vienna and come on to home in the legitimate way of trade and I might be making a coil about nothing.

Then I would remember that Blondel had been with Richard. And with that the belt, on sale in Rome, would assume a dark and dreadful significance. Might there be some reason why I had walked in that street, paused by that window? Might there even be some hint of guidance in the fact that I found the two men alone?

I said, ‘I would like to show you something but if the women or anyone else come in don’t let them see and contrive to talk of some other matter. Look, I found this in a shop—and I have made quite certain that it is Richard’s.’

I shook the belt out before their eyes and some part of my mind, the part which had accused me of being fanciful, romantic, overdramatic, overconcerned, was quite satisfied. If I had shaken a live and venomous snake in their faces they—being brave knights—would have blanched less.

‘Great God!’ Egidio said. ‘What did I tell you?’

From sentences cut short, from single words, I gathered that for the last month or more there had been anxiety about Richard’s well-being. Ships which had left Acre several days later than the
St. Josef
had arrived in Dover, in Sandwich, in Romney. The word “shipwreck” was beginning to be handed about, cautiously, as though it were a red-hot chestnut by a winter fire.

‘But this belt,’ I said, ‘shows no sign of having been in salt water. Look, the soft chamois leather she lined it with is smooth and supple. Salt water would have hardened and wrinkled it.’

‘That is very true,’ said Sir Stephen, testing the leather between his finger and thumb.

‘The Queen says,’ I ventured, ‘that he was wearing it when he left Acre—not that I have mentioned my purchase to her or to Joanna.’

‘That was wise,’ Egidio said.

‘And so far as it was possible to make certain, I did make certain that the belt came from Vienna.’

‘And that,’ said Sir Stephen, ‘opens up other possibilities than shipwreck—dear God!’

‘Leopold?’

Sir Stephen nodded. ‘I will take the belt to Rouen,’ he said.

Mindful of my private doubt, and meticulous because Blondel was concerned, I said:

‘Of course the Queen may have been mistaken. You will understand that I hesitated to question her too closely. All this may mean nothing—if she were mistaken—Richard may have sold the belt long before he left Acre.’

‘I believe he did once say that he would sell London if he could find a buyer,’ Egidio said. ‘But the belt his wife gave him…’

‘Could you make sure, Lady Anna? Positively sure that this belt was about his body when he set sail?’ Sir Stephen asked.

‘I could try,’ I said with a certain distaste for the task, but remembering that where Richard was there Blondel was likely to be.

‘You look tired,’ I said to Joanna, ‘and you are to hunt with the count in the morning. You go to bed, I will do the hair brushing.’

And presently, in the old, familiar intimacy, I said:

‘You carry the pretence well, Berengaria. I thought that your asseveration that he was wearing your belt was quite a masterly, artistic touch,’

‘Dear Anna,’ she said, ‘you credit me unduly. That was true. He was wearing the belt and he did mention it when he left.’

Then it wasn’t shipwreck that had overtaken them.

III

The days that followed were full of confusion and speculation and restlessness. Sir Stephen took the belt and rode away to Rouen. He, Count Egidio and I had agreed to say nothing to Richard’s wife and sister about my find until it had been inspected and discussed at headquarters and the secret was kept well until Young Sancho, for whom we had tarried at Rome, arrived at last. Partly he came to welcome Berengaria and escort her on the last stage of her journey to Aquitaine, partly to make his peace with Count Egidio with whom he had a feud of long standing. Since the marriage of Egidio and Joanna would bring the two young men into a relationship made closer by the affection which existed between Joanna and Berengaria, it seemed advisable that they should come to terms. But Sancho came bearing not only the traditional olive branch but news from the outer world, and chatter which Egidio and I had taken some pains to exclude from the bower, and within five minutes of his arrival he had blurted out what, I suppose, all Christendom knew by that time—that Richard’s ship was long overdue and that there was a grave fear that he had been shipwrecked.

Joanna wept desolately. Although in a moment of fury she had confessed a lifelong jealousy of her brothers—it was in Sicily during a quarrel with Eleanor that she had accused her mother of caring only for her sons—she had plainly been devoted to Harry, the “Young King,” as they called him, to Geoffrey of Brittany and to Richard; and when Harry and Geoffrey were dead she had concentrated upon Richard all the force of her sisterly affection. She had admired him so much; even her jealousy of him had its roots in admiring envy; she had taken such pride in his exploits, shared his disappointment over the failure to take Jerusalem. She was all woman, gentle, easily moved to tears, interested only in her small personal life, but she was a Plantagenet woman and Richard fitted exactly the pattern of manhood to which she would have conformed had she been a boy.

‘Now they are all gone, all my brothers. John is not my brother—he was a changeling even in his cradle. All my handsome, brave, merry brothers gone!’

Berengaria wept too, shedding her tears beautifully. I knew, as no one else did, that the full flower of her passion for Richard had withered and shrivelled in the cold winter of disillusionment; that the sapphires and the silver had proved to be glass chips and tin. But death—or even the rumour of death—bestows a kind of sanctity, spreads glamour. The dead man’s faults fade away, his virtues increase and shine and the widow of even a bad man will forget the long unkindness and remember the single amiability, the one charitable word. It is true of dead women, too. Father, when he set the lovely memorial altar in place, wasn’t commemorating the mad creature who had sprung at him and clawed him with her nails. Life may or may not bring disillusionment; death most certainly brings illusion. So Berengaria wept—not for the man who had left her for Raife of Clermont but for the red-headed knight whom she had looked upon from the ladies’ gallery at Pamplona; and her sorrow was genuine enough.

Sister and wife could weep and I envied them. I couldn’t very well sit down and cry about a lute player who had shared the King’s fate, whatever that was. I did not, even then, wholly believe the shipwreck story; that belt had never been in salt water. But I realised the shakiness of the evidence. Richard might have sold, lost, been robbed of the belt long before the waters closed over him.

And there were times, too, when I thought: if Blondel were dead I must have known. I wouldn’t have uttered such a word to anyone in the world. But I could not forget a day and a night in Acre when I could neither eat nor sleep; when for me the sun was clouded as though a dust storm raged. Nothing had happened; there was no thing, however small, to which I could point and say, that is the cause of my misery! But I was sunk in misery. Blondel’s next letter, clumsily writ with his left hand, told us that he had been wounded on such-and-such a day and, reckoning back, I knew that that day of clouded horror had been the one when he had been smitten. He couldn’t be dead and I not know.

Aloud, of course, I could only mention the belt which had not been in the sea. And having mentioned it, I must tell the story of its finding and go on, picking over the evidence and meekly accepting rebukes for my secretiveness until I was almost crazed.

Then Berengaria said that we could not stay in Rome any longer. We must move nearer the centre of things. So we packed and proceeded to Le Mans in Maine where Sir Stephen, his errand in Rouen completed, had found us comfortable accommodation on his way back. There Young Sancho left us; and there we settled down, well within range of every story concerning Richard’s fate which rumour chose to spread.

They were so varied and so colourful, those stories, that if I had not been concerned for Blondel nor felt pitiful towards Joanna and Berengaria I should have taken delight in them. Richard, they said, had never taken ship from Acre at all; he had turned back to Damascus and joined Saladin and together they were setting out to repeat Alexander the Great’s conquest of India. All along Richard had preferred Saladin to any of his Christian allies, hadn’t he? And hadn’t Saladin sent him presents?

Richard had joined the Templars. Some obscure shipmaster had come forward with a story of carrying a mysterious passenger, “taller than ordinary and of overbearing manner,” to Malta. And Richard, whoever else he had insulted during the campaign, had always treated the Grand Master of the Knights Templar with deference, hadn’t he? And hadn’t he always been a monk at heart? Look at his behaviour to his wife; when she was within a stone’s throw he had held off, celibate, in his tent.

Richard had been seen in England; in Sherwood where an outlaw named Robin Hood held sway. An archer who had lost his right arm at Acre and returned home and joined the outlaws because he was starving and was the kind of person to whom Hood’s charity extended had seen and recognised him. And wasn’t that reasonable? The outlaws were the body who defied Count John, Longchamp and Geoffrey of York alike. With their help Richard intended to retake his kingdom.

Richard was in Normandy. A milkmaid in Caen had looked up from her milking and seen a tall stranger with a red-gold beard who had begged a drink of milk. She had given him not only the milk—he had a compelling eye, she said—but the manchet of bread and the onion which comprised her noonday piece. He had promised her a manor in return and said, “England was once conquered from Normandy and, by God’s eyes, she shall be retaken therefrom.”

Wasn’t that a feasible story? Wasn’t that just how Richard would speak?

People who too readily believed each story did so, I thought, because they didn’t make allowances for the enormous upspringing, overwhelming power of imagination in common, downtrodden people. Every one of these stories originated at a low level, from people who had held their hands to a candle and
imagined
themselves warm, had thawed a bacon rind and crust and
imagined
a feast. I had walked amongst and talked to the poor in Pamplona, in Sicily, Messina, Acre and Rome and I
knew
why the poor are given to easy credulity, gossip and superstition. If poor people ever looked things straight in the face they would cut their throats from sheer despair; they don’t; they pretend, they decorate, they imagine, they believe. They make the best Christians simply
because
they believe. And they believe because they must. The shipmaster who landed a man who didn’t tell his business, the archer who saw a recruit to the outlaws, the milkmaid who gave a stranger a drink of milk—they chose to believe that they saw Richard. And, if the thought of the world had tended towards the second coming of Christ instead of towards the mysterious whereabouts of Richard Plantagenet, what they saw would have been a divine being with a halo, not a mere king.

But to whom, now that Blondel had gone, could I say such things? He would have understood, would have delighted in the flight of fancy, but now I was surrounded by the realists, the flat-footed seekers after fact, the most easily deceived of all men.

So I held my tongue, only repeating what I knew and pursuing my own worrying—what had happened to Blondel? until the situation took another turn.

It began with a young groom scrambling up outside our window and thrusting his tousled head through the aperture and shouting excitedly, ‘My lady, they’re saying in the town that the King has been found.’

‘Where? Where?’ we cried, for as often as the stories had come in, as often as they had been disproved, hope and the absence of any certainty as to Richard’s fate had lingered; though it weakened with every passing day. The young groom had nothing to add to his announcement. ‘Run and find out,’ Berengaria said, ‘and come back as soon as you hear anything more.’

Nothing fresh was learned all that day. I went out myself and listened and gossiped and asked questions. The King was found, thanks be to God! And that was all anyone knew.

‘Count Raymond will be back this evening, straight from Rouen,’ Joanna reminded us.

The betrothed couple were passing through a trying period. The marriage had been more or less arranged between themselves, and with Richard’s careless consent, before we had left Acre. But though Richard, who loved his sister in his way and could forgive anything in a good crusader—which Egidio was—had overlooked the fact his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the count’s father, lord of Toulouse, were bitter enemies. Eleanor actually had a claim of some validity to the count’s territory and had more than once made attempts to take possession of it. Joanna, backed by Richard’s consent to the marriage, could have ignored her mother’s feelings in the matter but that was not her way. She wanted everything to be amicable and pleasant. She had written to her mother from Acre and again, several times, from Rome. Eleanor, desperately trying to hold England for Richard, desperately disappointed by the crusade’s failure, was in a chastened mood, in no mind to take another fight in hand. She would, she wrote back, give her consent to the marriage; she would even not renounce her claim to the lands but pass them on to her daughter (a typically Eleanor Aquitainian arrangement!), provided that she approved of the young man himself. Egidio would have gone to London. He would have gone to Baghdad—barefoot, if needful—so much in love was he; but Eleanor repudiated that notion. Presently, she wrote, she would be in Rouen, Richard would be in Rouen and the whole family could gather and discuss this matter. Then there came the news of Richard’s disappearance and Joanna herself thrust away all idea of the wedding. This was no time for such thoughts. Egidio agreed. But time passed; what would have been the period of mourning, had we been quite certain of Richard’s death, ended. Egidio stayed with us and Berengaria and I were as tactful as possible, humouring the lovers, leaving them often alone. But it was an irksome situation. Then Eleanor—now more than ever distraught by the way affairs were going—did arrive in Rouen and there was a suggestion that we should all move on to that city. It came to nothing. Rouen was very crowded; emissaries, ambassadors must be accommodated; we were well placed in Le Mans, were we not?