The Passionate Brood (25 page)

So, having given it into Chalus’s keeping to add to the loan of gold stitched into the lining of that miser’s mail, John turned to the question of an escort. He had grown a little golden beard since the crusaders brought home the fashion from the handsome Saracen sheiks and, back at Guildford, he plucked very thoughtfully at that beard, considering the size of the escort. He wanted it to be strong enough, but he was still more anxious that it should be inconspicuous. Just in case the barons guessed the crypt was empty—or in case Richard ever got to know. The bare thought of Richard knowing made him err on the side of secrecy. And the night before his guest departed for Austria he lost a good deal of sleep over it, remembering the robbers in the woods. But they were just amateurs, Chalus had assured him. So John rose in a better temper, called for his hunting boots, and rode with him as far as Shere. The miller there had a pretty daughter who had so far eluded him.

It seemed a strange coincidence that the armed convoy had scarcely parted from its royal sponsor when Chalus came upon the tall, brown fellow who had held Philip’s letter upside down and handed it back so unconcernedly. He was leaning indolently against a tree fondling a little lame doe, and the faded green of his leather jerkin was so much the colour of the foliage that Chalus was almost level with him before he could think of turning back. But the man had seemed simple enough to outwit before and even if he were not alone, what were a handful of thieving outlaws now one had an armed guard? So Chalus nodded casually and rode past with a slack rein, calling back over his shoulder to the captain of the guard, “That’s the fellow I told you about who had the impertinence to rifle my wallet when I came.”

But to his surprise the captain of the guard, a gnarled old-timer who had served with the Plantagenets since he was a boy, stopped short in his tracks and crossed himself. And the next thing they knew was a rain of arrows from the thicket on either side. They were so completely taken by surprise that before John’s men-at-arms could lift bow-string to cheek each of them had an arrow quivering in his right wrist. The man leaning against the tree just threw back his head and laughed.

“For God’s sake, why don’t you cut him down?” raged Chalus, drawing his sword. “Can’t you see the grinning dolt has nothing but a hunting knife?”

“But he could strangle the life out of you with his bare hands,” warned the captain, urging his horse between them like a shield.

“How d’you know? Who is he?” demanded Chalus.

The old soldier opened his mouth as if to speak, caught the outlaw’s eye, and thought better of it. And as the rest of the gang closed in from the woods about his helpless, bleeding escort, Chalus let loose a flood of impotent profanity. For amateurs, they had made a pretty good job of it, and all he could do was to threaten them with horrible punishment if they interfered with the property of Prince John. The sacks on his mules contained a present of Wonersh wool, he improvised, on its way to the Duke of Austria. Naturally, the Prince wanted to stand well with him just now in the hope of expediting the release of his brother. A hope which should appeal to all down-at-heel Englishmen who found living conditions so difficult just now that they were forced to take to the woods.

Their leader seemed unimpressed by either threats or blandishments. “If Prince John wants these sacks taken to Austria, to Austria they shall go,” he promised blandly. “And if it helps you to sleep more soundly o’ nights I swear no man shall tamper with them until they have done the King good service.” Still stroking the doe’s ear, he rapped out half a dozen orders as if he were the King himself. And when some of his stalwarts were all for setting on Chalus, he looked as if he would forestall them. With the lightning strength of a master wrestler he had him from his saddle, grovelling on the ground in their midst. Then, with a shrug and a laugh, he changed his mind. “Let’s give him a year or two more,” he decided, looking down at him contemptuously. “I’ve a friend who may like to meet him, and God forbid that I should deprive him of his kill!” According to his code, that was the sporting thing to do. It did not occur to him that in years to come he might curse himself for not having torn the treacherous wretch limb from limb.

The convoy went on its way with its double set of guards, the tall outlaw riding with careless grace at its head. Only Chalus and the Captain of the Guard were left behind, ignominiously chained to a stake in a cow-shed. “Funny, now that cursed brigand’s gone I’ve just remembered whom he reminded me of!” remarked the badly shaken Count, watching the dwindling cavalcade through a chink in the planking. “What were you going to tell me about him back there on the path?”

But the Captain was suddenly very sleepy. Young Lackland might pay him his wages, but his loyalties went back to the days when Henry the Second’s word was law in England. The golden days when he—Giles of Oxford—had taught the Duke of Aquitaine and his foster-brother to ride their first ponies. Days when Oxford castle rang with the pomp and circumstance of a rich, worldly-wise archbishop and the scurfy and laughter of family life. He could remember the black day when words spoken in Angevin anger had murdered the archbishop in his own cathedral; and the awful day at Dover—before he got his commission in the Holy Land—when King Richard, drunk with rage, had sent him to fix a notice on the Reeve Hall. And although the notice had set a price on Robin’s head which had never yet been claimed, old Giles began pulling off his boots and making himself a bed in the straw. “Nothing special,” he yawned, “except that I’ve heard tell he’s written a book.”

He stretched himself out with a great rattling of chains and was soon snoring like an old campaigner. He had nothing to worry about, seeing that Robin himself—who never forgot old friends—had winked when the padlocks were fastened, and told him to let the old skunk go in the morning.

But the Count of Chalus lay awake most of the night thinking of his companion’s words. Presumably an outlaw who wrote books could read, even if he
had
held Philip’s letter upside down. So instead of returning to face John, Barbe hurried back to Chalus and set about strengthening his own castle. For once, he spared no expense, and he prayed from the bottom of his black heart that Richard Cœur de Lion would never get free.

Richard came home to England in the Spring. Fit and handsome as ever, with a fine new beard that became him and a reputation that would outlive him. If he strode about more restlessly than ever most people supposed it was to make up for fourteen months of captivity. But those who knew him best guessed it was because he didn’t want to sit down and think, for—to the mystification of his subjects—he had come back without their new Queen.

The sleepy Surrey town of Guildford was seething with excitement because as soon as the Dowager Queen heard that he had landed she hurried there to plan with John a family reunion. As poor Avisa was not invited to set her husband’s house in order, Eleanor brought old Gregory, who used to serve the late King. He was so shaky these days that he only retarded the joyful hustle, but the way a younger son had established himself in the country offended his sense of decorum. “Where shall we put this, Madam?” he demanded, when the servants had taken down John’s standard from the hall. And Eleanor had answered indulgently, “Oh, in the river if you like—it has hung
there
four years too long!” She spoke absently, out of her own happy thoughts, but the old man had taken her at her word and had tottered down with it to the River Wey. And there had been quite a scandal because some respectable towns-women whose daughters John had seduced had thrown the gorgeous silk thing in the water with their dirty dish clouts.

The people of Guildford had almost forgotten how splendid Richard looked. As he rode through the town they rushed from shops and houses to cheer him, and if the more thoughtful among them remembered how he had fought against his father and outlawed his foster-brother, the broad red cross on his breast and all he had suffered in its cause argued well for a humbler temper. His was the forthright, openhanded type that appealed to them—and they were proud to have him represent their breed. John was well enough, with his easy accessibility and pleasure-loving habits which put money in their pockets, but Richard’s courage had made the name of Englishman something to be reckoned with throughout the world. He had cost them a pretty penny, but in return he had fed that aggravating sense of superiority that they valued still more.

Their enthusiasm knew no bounds when he stood tall in his stirrups to wave to them but—shove and scramble as they would—they could see no queen. There was Johanna, their own beloved princess, with her new husband; and the only other woman they could see was a Greek girl, bright as a parakeet in silks and beads, pricking her mettlesome little Arabian mare close behind the King. At first they wondered if he had brought them back this brazen, bare-headed child as their queen. But of course that could not be—for Berengaria, they had been told, was white as magnolia blossom. An exquisite lady who had refused half the princes of Europe for his sake and who had nursed him devotedly through some pestilential foreign fever. Their hearts were warm with welcome for her—poor Berengaria, who was raging in proud loneliness in Rome!

She ought to have been there at that family reunion when Richard and his party rode in through the barbican and John and his mother came down the castle steps to meet them. But it was for Eleanor the women shed tears of sympathetic joy when Richard sprang from his horse to gather her to his breast—the indomitable old Queen who had lived and suffered with them through the last lean years. With an arm still about her he turned with casual good humour to dismiss them. He had done so little for them, and they adored him. They would tell their children such stories about him that in years to come he would still be the hero of their race. While John, who had revived the Wonersh wool trade and had the men of Chiddingfold taught how to blow glass, and who really wanted their favour if only because it annoyed the barons, stood eclipsed and forgotten. When he turned to follow his family into the hall, he was confronted by the portentous sight of his elder brother’s three embroidered leopards crouching where his own single beast had ramped and was aware of the faithful Picot sulkily picking bits of scarlet silk here and there so as to turn their fierce snarls into ludicrous smirks. But he only laughed and wrung his brother’s hand. If John hated having to turn out of the best bedroom, or felt like an unsuccessful Judas, he had sense enough to serve expediency with good grace and play the genial host.

Eleanor was welcoming her daughter and, because she was over seventy, it seemed only yesterday that Johanna had been seventeen. “The echo of her voice has barely died away in the rooms at Oxford before you’ve brought her back to us!” she said, slipping an affectionate hand through her new son-in-law’s arm. She asked them to tell her about their journey from Sandwich and all they had done in London, but her eyes and thoughts always came back to the splendid crusader at her side.

“We did try to hurry, darling, but the city seemed to have gone mad,” Richard told her. It was the same London that he had once said he would sell.

“Even your peace-loving shopkeepers, John, fought each other to get a glimpse of the man who had killed so many infidels,” laughed Raymond. “Richard and I had to ride slowly to avoid trampling on small boys who believed our saddles would be hung with Saracens’ heads.”

“And every time we pulled up to avoid them,” added Johanna, “the women kept kissing Richard’s scabbard and fingering Ida’s foreign clothes.”

Richard suddenly remembered his lovely hostage. He duly presented her as the Emperor of Cyprus’s daughter, and was at pains to explain that he had brought her as an insurance against any trouble her father might make for de Lusignon on the island. As a stroke of policy, the matter was unimpeachable, and the way Eleanor turned from the absorption of her own family to set the little interloper at ease was a lesson in courtesy. But when she had handed the girl over to the care of her ladies she said to Johanna in the privacy of her bedroom, “Why on earth didn’t he bring Berengaria?”

“She wouldn’t come—as well,” explained Johanna, while her women tidied her after her journey. “At first he had a number of important people to see and things to attend to. There was the Emperor Henry and a whole string of bishops waiting to congratulate him on his release. Of course, he meant to go and fetch her as soon as he was free. But in the meantime that horrible Chalus man called at the villa and took care to tell her that Ida Comnenos was with him.”

“She
might
be only a hostage,” said Eleanor, smoothing the snowy folds of her headdress.

“I pointed that out, but unfortunately Chalus had told her the girl had been at Triffels hanging about for Richard. And Berengaria, who is the soul of kindness, has always been so hard about Ida. So she wrote him the coldest of letters telling him she’d made some very pleasant friends and preferred to winter in Rome. He probably deserved it, but it was the sort of letter that dries up everything decent in a man. I had to take it to him because nobody else dared.” Johanna threw down an embroidered towel and replaced the lovely emerald ring Raymond had given her. Wrinkling her adorable nose at an appetising whiff of roast duck, she put an arm about her mother’s waist and drew her back to the hall. “All this has meant that poor Blondel has had to come home without Yvette,” she whispered as they took their seats. “And probably all four of them are utterly miserable.”

They could see John buttonholing Blondel in a window recess. By the wary eye each of them kept on the King’s back, it was clear that he was trying to find out if there had been a matrimonial quarrel, and Blondel was being loyally uninformative. Knowing her younger son’s hopeful curiosity, Eleanor rescued the embarrassed squire with a beckoning finger. “If I hadn’t sold my last jewel, dear Blondel, I should have liked you to wear it for finding the King,” she told him, when he hurried across the hall to greet her. “But I am told you left a very precious jewel behind in Rome, so I’m going to persuade him to let you wear that one instead.” As she tilted back her head to laugh at his blushing pleasure, her dark eyes were as vivid as ever in her ageing face, but he thought the lovely, ringless hand he kissed felt more frail. And even as it slid from his grateful fingers her attention was caught by the sudden wrangling of her sons.

They were standing beneath the rich lights of John’s new coloured glass windows. There was no fire, for it was spring; but their voices rapped across the empty hearth as sharply as the crackling of sticks. John—sulky and defiant—was saying, “Somebody must keep the castles properly garrisoned. You didn’t want them to go to ruin, did you, like the crops?” And Richard—scoffing, fresh from foreign conquests—replied, “What d’you suppose I care for your toy fortifications? Or whether you wanted civil war or not? It’s your friendliness with France—”

John’s shifty eyes narrowed at that. He wasn’t sure how much Richard knew. Did he know, for instance, that Chalus had sat in this very room tempting him to treachery with a proposal from Philip. A fiendish proposal that they should out-bid the English ransom by offering Leopold fifty thousand marks apiece to keep him in captivity. John had wanted Richard’s crown, and Chalus had wanted his wife, and so between them they had raised the sum. And Chalus, travelling very secretly, had offered to take the money to Austria. But something had gone wrong, and Richard had been liberated. Chalus had sent some cock-and-bull story about being robbed before ever he reached the English coast; but even if the rat had double-crossed him, John calculated rapidly, it was only one man’s word against another’s! And Richard had always stuck up for him—even against Robin. “You
used
to be quite friendly with France. And
someone
had to treat with foreign powers, if only to safeguard our commercial shipping,” he countered brazenly.

Richard drew off his gauntlets and threw them on the table, where they landed with a clatter among the dishes. “That’s what I made William Longchamps Chancellor for,” he said, glaring at the filched signet ring on his brother’s finger.

John drew it off and handed it to him, negligently. “Then it wasn’t particularly clever of you,” he said. Men gasped. They all thought it, but no one but John would have had the effrontery to say it. “The people always hated him. You must have known that. They used to call after him in the street ‘bandy-legged little Frenchman!’ They wanted an Englishman.”

“You, in fact!”

“Anyone—who cared a damn what happened to them.” Both of them knew that the people had wanted Robin. And Richard had wanted him too, and, hating to part with him—had lost him altogether. John suddenly changed his tone, speaking with effective restraint. “My dear fellow, remember you’ve been away four years! If I’ve assumed more power than you intended it has been almost forced upon me. The country was bled white by your war. Trade practically at a standstill. No able landowners left and all the best craftsmen and labourers in the army—”

Richard had been warned about all these things before—by someone whose opinion meant far more to him than John’s. He had deliberately ignored them, but he knew them to be true. Had he not gone over them again and again in his delirium at Haifa? “You need not labour my negligence,” was all he said. Everyone was astonished at his mildness. And John, as usual, was quick to seize upon the moment of his softening. He indicated with charming diffidence that his guests were waiting to begin. “You know Avisa and I have a son?” he asked eagerly, drawing his brother towards the table. “I’ve called him Henry after our father.”

Richard was glad he had done that. Often of late, sensing the bond between Berengaria and her father, he had felt compunction for his behaviour towards his own. “Splendid!” he approved instantly, taking the chair of state beside his mother. “You two have been luckier than Berengaria and I. Let’s drink to the youngest Plantagenet!”

John was all radiant hospitality at once. “It must be the best vintage. None of our boorish ale. There’s a special Bordeaux I want you to taste. You’ll be surprised how I’ve increased our wool export by importing more wine.” Waving the wine steward aside, he insisted upon going down to the cellars to choose it himself. If only he could keep Richard well amused at Guildford, it might be weeks before he discovered about the rifled coffers at Westminster.

When he had bustled out beyond the serving screens at the far end of the hall, Eleanor sighed with relief. She was growing old, and weary of the quarrelling of her brood. But the others felt cheated. They had expected a real Angevin row. “I can’t think how you can be so patient with him!” exclaimed Raymond, who had suffered much veiled insolence and secret circumvention on his last visit and had hoped to see John well and truly shown up.

Richard only shrugged, helping himself with zest to some slices of good red English beef which a page was handing round on a long silver skewer. “He didn’t get a square deal over the inheritance, and my father spoiled him hopelessly.”

“And, of course, none of us ever takes him seriously,” added Johanna. It was one of the things about the Plantagenets that always amazed and infuriated their friends.

“I think you should,” insisted Raymond.

“Just as if he knew more about our affairs than we do ourselves!” thought Johanna, feeling aggressively English. She considered her husband was being irritatingly ponderous, but Richard had a wholesome regard for Raymond’s common sense. “Very well then,” he agreed. “Just to show him—and Philip—that I’m master in my own land, I’ll be crowned all over again next week at Winchester.”

Eyes were raised and knives suspended in pained surprise. His mother touched his hand reprovingly. “But Berengaria won’t be here—” she ventured.

“And you always said it should be at West-min-stair,” Johanna reminded him, tactlessly mimicking the way her sister-in-law always said it.

Richard glared at her. “That’s why,” he said laconically.

Eleanor could see he was in no mood for argument. “It will be a strange sort of coronation,” she said resignedly. “You with no queen and me with no crown.” When Richard looked up, his mouth too full for questioning, she explained cheerfully, “I had to pawn it to the Jews to help get you back.”