The Passionate Brood (26 page)

He finished his mouthful in silence. Out of the secret welling of his loneliness he wondered just how much good he would be to them now they
had
got him back. He knew he wasn’t clever at statesmanship, like Philip. Nor shrewd, like John, about tithes and charters and crops and all the other dull things these English were for ever arguing about. During those first few months after he came to the throne he had had Robin at his elbow, prompting him. Robin, who knew just how far one could push these patient inscrutable peasants, and where one must stop. Who knew just the sort of gesture they loved and could prove, oddly enough, that there were certain gestures they loved more even than money. Robin, who never asked for lands or praise or power—who drew out all one’s best with happy laughter and offered sound judgment so unobtrusively that one believed it to be one’s own…Richard caught himself looking up expectantly at the banging of a door, and wrenched himself back to the present. He picked up his mother’s hand and kissed it gratefully; but, as usual, she repudiated sentiment with common sense. “What is a dowager’s crown, anyway, to a woman who has had two coronations of her own?” she asked brusquely. “And a train of fleur-de-lis reaching half-way down the aisle of St. Denis?”

“Vain old woman!” laughed Richard. He looked down at her out of those shameless, alluring cat’s eyes of his, and lowered his voice. “You’ll look after that ardent little Cypriot for me, won’t you, and lead her back into the paths of virtue?” he asked, with sudden irrelevance. It was the same sidelong grin he had been wont to give her as a boy when cajoling her for some excitement forbidden by his father or confessing to some crazy escapade. He had never pretended to her, and she had often wondered humorously whether she should accept his candour as a compliment or the reverse.

She glanced along the table at Ida, wondering exactly what there had been between them. It wasn’t the first time she had had to fend off a girl he had tired of or who had fallen too embarrassingly in love with him. But this girl, with her ripe lips and smouldering eyes, had come between him and his wife. Eleanor could not forgive her that. “I suppose I shall have to,” she agreed reluctantly. “But it would be easier if I knew exactly how unattractive you’ve already been making the paths of virtue look!” As Richard vouchsafed no indication, she leaned across him to catch the girl’s attention. “How would you like to come back to Oxford with me after the coronation?” she invited, with her most persuasive smile.

Ida looked up from her platter in panic. To be shut up in a castle with an old woman was unthinkable after the freedom and emotional excitement of the crusade. “It is kind of you, Madam,” she stammered, in the careful Norman she had improved so patiently for love of Richard. “But I am all alone in this strange country. I beseech you, don’t send me away from—from the few people I know.”

Since Raymond and Johanna must soon be going back to Toulouse, the cause of her desperate entreaty was obvious. Unable to meet her imploring eyes, Richard plunged into a conversation with a brilliant young theologian, Stephen Langton, who had been recommended to him as a possible candidate for the see of Canterbury.

But Eleanor had no such qualms. “Nonsense, my dear!” she told the girl bluntly. “You can’t go following the King about now. In the East it was different. But here he will have councils and all sorts of state business to attend to.” She turned to the youngest lady of her household, who was about Ida’s age. “We must find room for her at Oxford, mustn’t we, Dorigan? Until the King gets her a husband and a household of her own.”

And Dorigan, anxious to please, suggested the Tower room. To her it was just a room that was never used. She had no idea that it was peopled with happy family ghosts, and was covered with confusion when the King himself turned sharply and vetoed the idea. And Ida, torn between the twin horrors of Oxford and a husband, thought in her self-absorbed young vanity that he did so to keep her near him. Never once, in the hours they had spent together, had he talked to her of the Tower room or the people he really loved.

“The little boat you were carving for Arthur is still up there,” Eleanor told him. “After you left I had it brought from Dover and put on the window seat. But Constance wouldn’t let him come while you were out of England.”

Richard smiled, seeing his gallant little galley framed in the grey stone arch of the window just where the boy would see it as he came to the top of the turret stair. Outlined against that vast expanse of sky, she would look as if she rode an azure sea. It would be fun to have Arthur there—or even John’s youngster. But best of all, of course, to fill the old room with a family of his own. Tall sons to take the place of Henry, Robin, and himself, and that “daughter like Johanna” Berengaria had always wanted. He could almost hear their quarrelling and their laughter, and the eager hurrying of their feet on the stairs. Suddenly, he wanted Berengaria unbearably. What a fool he’d been! Why couldn’t he have been big enough to understand her hurt pride? But women exaggerated things so. Just because that poor pretty Comnenos jade had come to him when he was simply starved for the tenderness of a woman…And to whom else could she have gone? All the same, Richard wished he had not taken his wife at the bitterness of her word. Someone had told him since that that swine Chalus had been seen with her in Rome. As likely as not he’d been pestering her. With half his mind still in Rome he asked automatically, “And how is Arthur?”

It was John who answered, appearing round the corner of the screens followed by the laden cellarer. “Remarkably strong, by all accounts,” he reported, without enthusiasm. Under either arm he had tucked a cobwebbed bottle of the wine he had been hoarding against the day when Richard’s prolonged captivity should make his own son Henry England’s heir. Old Gregory hurried forward. It pained him to see a Plantagenet fetching his own wine. He fussed over the serving pages and insisted upon handing the King’s drink with his own shaky hand.

“Well, here’s to the new Henry—” began Richard, but paused with the wine half-way to his lips. “My dear Gregory, the old horn cups! I don’t come home from the wars every day!” he complained, half vexed and half amused at what he supposed to be the old fellow’s forgetfulness. “Where are the gold ones?”

He could have bitten his tongue as soon as he had said it. He could see Gregory, his stiffening back still bent apologetically, raising troubled eyes to the Dowager Queen, and was aware of people fiddling with their untasted wine in uncomfortable silence. “I see,” he said slowly, “you had to sell those too.” He smiled his acknowledgments to Raymond and to his mother, but it was only his eyes that smiled. Somehow Acre and Arsouf didn’t look so fine just then. “Well, here’s to the way you two bled this blessed island to pay my ransom!” he said briskly, and gulped down John’s best vintage with unappreciative palate, his former toast forgotten.

Eleanor heard the angry indrawing of breath that pinched his long, fine nostrils, and looked at the long, firm line of his mouth. There was something she longed to tell him—something that would wipe that bleak look from his face and bring back the laughing Dickon she loved. “It wasn’t only us—” she began.

Everyone looked at her. Even Raymond, who had worked with her to raise the money, hung on her words, hoping for some last-minute explanation of the miracle. After all, the wiping out of a fifty-thousand-mark deficit in a few weeks takes some explaining. But one cannot take a secret gift, and betray the giver. All her life Eleanor had had to juggle with divided loyalties. “It was just—the people,” she ended lamely. She was thankful when Stephen Langton rose to sign a blessing, and they were all free to push back their stools and drift into little chattering groups.

Only Richard, the hero of the hour, stood alone by the table. He was balancing a knife on the top of a dish of pomegranates they had brought back as a novelty from the East. The servants had already begun to clear and Picot was sprawling in the chair he had just vacated, telling him a funny story. It was something about a miller’s daughter who had been brought to the castle and had given John the slip. But Richard wasn’t really listening. He was calculating how long it would take people who had been bled white by a war to raise fifty thousand marks. There wasn’t as much, he knew, in the Royal treasury, and only a very rich man could spare it and go on living much as before so that the world wouldn’t know who had paid it. And he didn’t know any man as rich as that. Except Chalus, of course. And Chalus was no friend of his. Why, the miserly old bittern hadn’t even made Berengaria a wedding present of the borrowed crown. Probably that was why he’d gone to Rome now—to get the thing back.

The knife jerked downwards in Richard’s hand, inadvertently piercing the soft, pulpy heart of a pomegranate and squelching an ugly mess over a tablecloth so finely embroidered that it could only have been the work of Ann. Looking down at the soiled fleurs-de-lis, he remembered her prim fingers and her sharp tongue and the way she had fooled him. He was well out of that. But if ever another woman betrayed him…

He called a passing servant to clear away the mess and, before settling down to tell the family all about his adventures he clapped the misshapen little jester encouragingly on the back.

“Picot seems to be in good form,” observed John, pulling forward a chair for his elder brother in the middle of the circle. “Which story were you laughing at just now?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Richard vaguely. “I was just wondering which of us, Picot or I, was the bigger fool.”

He laughed again, whole-heartedly, in the way Eleanor loved to hear. Because Ann had been a slut, Berengaria would always be to him as the Holy Grail.

John was an excellent host. He had planned some sort of expedition for each day. Hawking and outdoor sports for the mornings, a visit to the Holy Well at Dunsfold or to Chiddingfold to see the new coloured glass being blown and boating parties on the Wey in the lengthening evenings. After supper, when the torches were lit, he would be in his element producing a really good entertainment with minstrels and mummers from London. And Richard, fresh from the monotony of Triffels, was ready to enter into it all. But just the first morning he cried off John’s hawking party. “It’s a marvellous morning for it,” he said, joining the others in the hall. “But if you don’t mind, dear fellow, I think I’ll go up to St. Martyr’s.”

Eleanor was not altogether surprised. There was a new gravity about Richard these days, and sometimes she felt that he was making a belated effort to meet and understand the spirit of his father. This was a source of great comfort to her, for she always felt that these two whom she had loved best might have been friends had they not been goaded by the bonds of relationship.

Ida Comnenos looked about her at all these tall Anglo-Normans standing around breaking their fast with rolls of bread and great draughts of ale. “They are all so healthy, and they must always be doing something!” she thought. Her own idea of breakfast was innumerable cups of thick, sweet coffee brought by a slave-girl to her cushion-strewn divan. She turned to Dorigan, whose hard bed she had shared in the ladies’ bower, and asked with perplexity, “What
is
St. Martyr’s?”

Dorigan drew her to a window. On the other side of the flat river valley, the morning sunlight was chasing cloud shadows across the slope of a steep and wooded hill. Perched on the top of it, four-square to the winds of Heaven, stood a small, squat chapel. “King Henry built it for the peace of poor Becket’s soul,” she said reverently.

“And who was Becket?” pursued Ida.

Dorigan looked profoundly shocked. She had supposed that everybody knew about their famous archbishop. “He was King Henry’s friend until he became so rich,” she explained with unconscious cynicism. “And then they quarrelled. And one evening after supper the King said, ‘Is there not one of you knights eating my bread who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ He didn’t really mean it, you know. He was just tired and in a temper because the Archbishop wouldn’t do what he wanted. But four of them got up and rode to Canterbury and murdered the poor man in his own cathedral…And afterwards, in his remorse, King Henry did public penance before his shrine and had chapels like that built all over the country for the pilgrims who go to Canterbury to pray for Thomas à Becket’s soul.”

Ida Comnenos watched a party of them coming down the hill. If she half closed her thick lashes they looked for all the world like little black flies crawling down the side of an inverted green bowl. She wasn’t interested in shrines and stuffy archbishops. “This king you’re talking about was Cœur de Lion’s father, wasn’t he?” she asked.

Her new friend nodded.

“But I still don’t see why he wants to toil up there on a day like this instead of going hawking.”

“He too quarrelled with his friend,” explained Dorigan, her piquant face all softened with pity.

“And did he have him murdered—like What’s-his-name?”

Dorigan implored her, with a gesture, to speak more quietly. “Of course not,” she whispered, glancing apprehensively over her shoulder at Richard, who was standing about in a detached sort of way watching the preparations for the day’s sport. “He outlawed him. And now a lot of people think he too is sorry. But it’s difficult to find out because nobody dares mention Robin’s name.”

Ida considered the situation, drumming with idle fingers on the stonework of the window. “Then he’ll be sure to go up there alone,” she deduced. Presently she crossed the hall to the open doorway where John was showing the party his valuable hawks. The steps were crowded with falconers, eager to hear their birds praised. The May morning was merry with the jingle of their little bells, and down in the courtyard the horses were being brought round. Richard had had his mother’s chair placed by the door so that she could watch the scene in comfort, and he was leaning over the back of it. Ida curtseyed demurely, lowering her eyes so as not to meet his sheepish grin. “Do you think, Madam, I might go hawking too?” she asked.

“Why, of course,” agreed Eleanor. “I hear you are a very clever horsewoman. Have them fetch her mare, John.”

John shouted down the order and turned to the girl with a quick, approving smile. Richard was no bad judge, he thought. When she pretended that she had never even seen the sport before he chose a gentle merlin and showed her how to carry it on her wrist. He was just enough like his brother to make the process interesting, but his hands were not so strong and he was so much shorter. Johanna, with the friendly helpfulness of a true sportswoman, lent her a leather glove. And when they were all ready, Richard himself came to the top of the short flight of steps to wish them good sport. He was very plainly dressed after his gorgeousness of yesterday, and the horse his page was walking up and down the bailey was without trappings.

“You won’t change your mind and come with us?” John shouted up to him. “There’s plenty of woodcock in Wootton Woods and heron down by Shere pool.”

But Richard shook his head. He was out of tune with hawking. Snaring helpless birds seemed tame after killing Saracens. Those had been the best years of his life perhaps—keyed up to danger all the time. If only he could have taken Jerusalem! If only he’d attacked once more from Beit Nuba! If only Philip hadn’t ratted! Every time he thought about it he hated Philip more. So he deliberately wrested his mind back to the inconsequent present, considering what an attractive young devil John was, laughing and showing off down there in the sunshine and bandying jokes in mongrel Norman with the crowd at the gate. Descending the steps and tousling the head of the very small page who had fought to hold his stirrup, it occurred to Richard that it would be mighty convenient if Ida thought so too!

But brunettes, however beautiful, were safe with John. In the bustle of getting through the cheering town, he did not even notice that his exotic hawking pupil lagged behind. He clattered up the steep street from the river laughing and shouting to Johanna, with the rest of the company pressing hard on their heels to catch the bright threads of their disjointed conversation and to lay bets on the chances of his great hooded gerfalcon killing a deer. He had had it trained to perch on their heads and to peck out their eyes, but Johanna contended that it was an Asiatic form of sport, and horrible. And Stephen Langton, who was of the party, said what could you expect when Christian countries like England still recognised the putting out of a man’s eyes as legal punishment? This started an argument, and it was easy enough for Ida to turn her horse unnoticed up a side street. Near Shalford mills she came upon the party of pilgrims she had seen from the castle window. They were resting and regaling themselves rather hilariously at an alehouse and showed her the sandy track that led up the hill to St. Martyr’s. “I should hurry, my dear,” giggled one of the women. “Such a tall, handsome man has just gone up that way!” Apparently, they had no idea he was the King. “They seem to get plenty of fun even out of a pilgrimage!” thought Ida, looking at their good-humoured, sunburned faces. She supposed it was all part of this peculiar country.

The last part of the climb was so steep that she tethered her little mare to a tree. The scarlet leather shoes which Eleanor had insisted upon her wearing kept filling with cool silvery sand—so different from the golden kind she was used to—so she took them off and went on climbing with them in her hand. The hill-top was deserted save for Richard’s horse, contentedly cropping the short grass in the shade of some birches. At sight of the great, glossy beast Ida’s red lips parted in a smile. She was glad she had left her mare at the bottom. “The King will have to carry me down on his saddle,” she thought. “The way he did that night I first saw him in Limassol.”

The little chapel shone new and white in the sunlight. Still panting lightly from her climb, she tip-toed to the open door and peered in. As her eyes grew accustomed to the cool gloom, she could make out the figure of a monk moving about the sanctuary and Richard kneeling very tall and still before the altar. He held his two-handed sword like a cross before him, and the lighted candles made a soft, blurred radiance behind his bowed head. It was like the paintings of new young Christian knights keeping vigil, which had so much impressed Saladin that he wanted to have his nephew admitted to their order of chivalry. Even Ida’s pagan soul was awed by such humble reverence in the most famous of them all.

She went back to the place where Richard’s horse was tethered and threw herself down on the warm earth, reviewing her new world through a miniature forest of stiffly curled fronds of young bracken. “This will be the first time I have seen him alone since we set foot in this horrible country,” she thought. “It’s been nothing but cheering crowds and a lot of silly ceremony and his everlasting family. But here, under these gold spangled branches, I will make him remember that it was I—and not his romantic queen—who sweltered and scratched for weeks in that loathsome inn so as to welcome him from prison. He was glad enough to have me that first night he was free!”

To her hot impatience it seemed a long time before the horse beside her pricked his ears and whinnied. Ida sat up. She could hear the harsh grating of spurs on the stone aisle. Richard had to bend his head to pass beneath the low spandrel of the door, and the action matched his mood. She saw him stand there for a moment or two, blinking at the light. Remembering that his sword was still in his hand, he sheathed it with unwonted gentleness and strode to the edge of the hill. He stood there, bare-headed and newly shriven. The sandy plateau dropped away sharply at his feet and all the South of England seemed spread before him in the morning sunlight. Fold upon fold, the wooded hills of Surrey merged into the blue distance of the Sussex weald. The bare Downs were a smudge of purple on the horizon. And somewhere beyond their bulwarks lapped the sparkling sea. Richard expanded strong lungs in exultation, straining his gaze to the utmost limits of his land. How could men breathe, he wondered, who did not live upon an island?

The panorama looked so much like a map that he began trying to pick out places he knew. There was a gap in the faint outline of the Downs that he imagined might be Pevensey, where his ancestor had landed—or Hastings, where the Normans had fought for it. How the Saxons must have hated them! For the first time he knew how it would feel to be a Saxon, and how his father had worked to mend that hatred. Somewhere farther east, he supposed, would be the busy ports of Winchelsea and Rye—and Sandwich, the gateway to his dukedoms on the Continent. And snugly inland, almost at his foot it seemed, the market towns of Worth and Reigate, and somewhere in the middle of the blue distance the manor of Horsted de Cahaignes where Blondel’s people lived. He said each name over carefully, trying to pronounce them as John did with no trace of foreign accent on the R’s. He always remembered with embarrassment landing from Aquitaine and asking the way to Arundel, and how the Sussex farmers had stared as dumbly as their sheep because he had called it “Hirondelle.”

But he had said his first prayers in Saxon at Hodierna’s knee. And this was his kingdom, and every castle from Arundel to Alnwick was his. The little English may trees blossomed pink and white around him, and down in the valley the young tops of the oaks were tipped with gold. His foot pressed fragrance from a clump of wild thyme and a lark rose singing to the blue. And when the lark had flown out of sight the clear notes of a hunting horn brought back memories of other Spring mornings. Richard turned and looked down on the tops of the beeches that made a soft mantle for the tower of Shere church and the miller’s pond, and suddenly he felt Robin to be very close. It was as if the spirit of England breathed upon him as it had done in boyhood. It could not hold him as it held Johanna and John, but in that moment it mastered him. His mind was empty of ambition. “If only people didn’t keep perstering me with what wants doing in the duchies!” he muttered, realising how happy a smaller—or less restless—man might be with just this little, sea-girt land. For the moment he had had a surfeit of war. “By the good heart of God, I’ll stay here till my next crusade!” he promised himself. “I’ll send Blondel back for Berengaria. And if only I can find Robin we three will go round seeing that these people get decent living conditions, humane game laws, and all the other things my father wanted.”

He laughed aloud at the idea and Ida, who had not dared to interrupt his exalted mood, got up and crossed the laced shadow cast by the birch trees. Unobserved, she watched the changing expressions of his face. Would he turn presently, laughing boisterously at her persistence, and kiss her with the careless arrogance she loved? Would he lift her on to his horse as if she were an amusing child, or take her offered womanhood with that half-grudging urgency for which she must always plot and tempt? Gazing at him, hungry for him, the warm-blooded Greek girl tortured herself remembering how his eyes smouldered when he looked down at Berengaria and how the hard lines of his mouth curved into a maddening, secret tenderness. How, even in some crowded room, he would sometimes draw his breath sharply at her touch so that men could not help seeing how utterly his body was hers. Hers—Berengaria’s. Everything was Berengaria’s. His body and his conquests and his name. The right to sit beside him at banquets and to walk unquestioned into the austere little cell of a room that was usually his bedroom in these grim northern castles. Everything but the proud joy of bearing his son. She, the ignored captive, had seen to that. She laughed cruelly, remembering how she had held aloft the dead Saracen’s head and how the poor exquisite Queen had shuddered at the sight.

Ida became aware that she was being watched from the chapel doorway, but it would take more than a disapproving old monk to shame her. With a gesture of defiance she shook back her windswept curls and ran to Richard, calling him by some soft Greek love name. He turned with surprise, his mind still bemused with plans for the future and memories from the past.