The Passionate Brood (29 page)

She had meant to tell him that she had seen Robin—that, however much Robin may have wanted to, he had not made love to her—and that staying in England did not matter so much now. But suddenly she saw that this would make Raymond feel second-best always. And from the first she had known him to be too good for that. She knew now that she would never tell anybody about Robin. Already, their meeting had begun to take on the guise of unreality like one of those wishful daydreams she used to indulge in when she was first sent to Sicily. “I only wanted to tell you that, after all, I’m glad you made me wear this dress,” she answered. Seeing that Raymond looked puzzled, she added evasively, “It isn’t many women of thirty who could still get into a dress they wore when they were seventeen, is it? Why, I wore it the day Blondel first came to us. I remember trying to be kind to him.”

Raymond pushed aside his papers. “That man gets all the luck!” he laughed. “What with his jaunt to Navarre, and squiring Richard all through the crusade, and that charming girl Yvette falling in love with him, and your trying to be kind!”

“He was very homesick,” explained Johanna, sticking the quill through his thick hair and thinking that the way it was beginning to grey just above the temples gave him distinction.

“So, I believe, am I,” pleaded Raymond.

It was very still and pleasant in the Constable’s room with the westering sunlight warming the round stone walls—rather like the Tower room at Oxford. And when Johanna looked at Raymond she saw him only. His humorous face and his dear, steadfast eyes. Brown eyes, with golden flecks in them, looking with compelling kindness into her own. There was no longer the shadowy figure of a tall, handsome dream lover behind him, dwarfing his charm.

Johanna was pleasantly sleepy after her day in the fresh air. She leaned against his shoulder, and he held her very close. He had a way of doing it that always made her want to laugh because it reminded her of the clenched fist on his shield with the motto “
Je maintiendrai
.” She was emotionally spent and happy in a new, muted kind of way. She even made the rare admission that she thought she must be a little tired.

“Impossible!” he teased.

“Perhaps I won’t ride quite so much when we get home,” she yawned drowsily.

Raymond held her asleep in his arms until his page called them to supper. He was beginning to savour the full richness of life. It was the first time his wife had alluded to Toulouse as home.

Richard gave England eight months. Eight months of fair promise and unprecedented popularity. The fame he had brought them was appreciated by the barons. The church—so long jeered at by John—commended his reverent manner, and the people believed their millennium was come.

But Richard wanted spacious action, and there was no one at hand to persuade him that the most difficult fields for conquest would always lie in his own nature. It was all very well dedicating himself to these people of his, but he wasn’t so sure that he really understood their needs. If he happened to see a man’s rick burn or his horse fall over a bridge he would be quicker than his own servants to help. But he just did not understand their passion for what they called “their rights” and their complicated system of tithes and tenures, and he was neither humble nor patient enough to learn. And John was clever enough to underline his mistakes. Where Robin would have asked him a few leading questions, giving him time to get the hang of things, John would explain each island custom with exaggerated patience just as if he were talking to a foreigner. Although there were men like Langton who would have given anything to help, Richard gave up going to council meetings and assizes. Why be tittered at in stuffy buildings, he argued, when he could quell men’s vitals with a sword?

Before Johanna left she told him about Berengaria and Chalus. “She knows I’d rather have rotted in prison than let any other man touch her!” he had raged approvingly. And, as Robin had foreseen, the bare thought of it sent him hot-foot to Rome. He meant to bring her back. But when he reached Rome he learned that Philip had encroached on his land, and that was the moment when England really lost him. After that, even his mother’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. His heart was hard with vengeance for Jerusalem. He sent for Blondel and Mercadier, and the best of England’s manhood was called to war again. They sailed up the Seine to Rouen. And for five years two Christian kings who had been friends in youth and fellow promoters of the most famous crusade in history fought each other like snarling dogs over every foot of debatable border land.

Berengaria had salved her pride. She had stayed in Rome until the world saw her heroic husband come for her, humbly and without his enticing hostage. Inevitably, their passion flamed again and Berengaria—who so loved beauty and home life—lived up and down the duchies in camp and battered castle for his sake. Perhaps her conscience made an atonement of it for her obstinacy. Determined not to grumble, she grew too self-controlled. Her lips, once so prone to laughter, began to fold too tightly in repose. Everyone who cared for them rejoiced over the reblossoming of their romantic love, but they themselves felt in their hearts that the first bloom had been knocked off it by hard words.

So the years passed—tedious for Berengaria and strenuous for Richard—until, besides his mighty dukedoms and his neglected island, he owned more of France than the French king. So much had Richard’s feelings changed that news of the death of their mutual enemy, Saladin, came to him as a personal blow, and he knew now that he would never have heart or interest to lead another crusade. So he went on picking one stupid quarrel after another until finally he stumbled upon the one he had been subconsciously hankering after, and the Anglo-Norman army found themselves encamped outside Chalus.

It was a base enough quarrel about a few pieces of gold. A ploughman had turned up a group of golden statues and a vase full of Roman coins on Barbe of Chalus’s land, and the exaggerated rumour of it had spread like wildfire across Maine and Anjou. Seeing that it was Roman gold, it seemed probable that Chalus had hidden it there himself. A clumsy trick out of which to make a test case, for according to feudal law he was obliged to pay part of it to his overlord. And if Richard didn’t bother to claim it, and the correct “due” were once paid to Philip, it might be fairly argued that he admitted Philip’s right.

But, contrary to Chalus’s calculations, Richard did claim it. Comparatively small as the treasure was, he came hurtling down from Gisors and Chalus had to give it up. He had hoped the Rome incident was forgotten and his furtive visit to England unsuspected. But when he sent out a messenger with the massive Roman ornaments everybody was talking about, Richard claimed his castle as well. So there was nothing for it but to pull up his super-strutted drawbridge and lower his double-pronged portcullis. And the sight of such unexpected defiance provided Richard with more zest than he had felt for months.

“Mercadier says this is going to be a mere practice at the butts compared with Gaillon and Freteval,” he said to Berengaria the first evening his batering rams got busy. “And as soon as we’ve taken the place we’ll go down to Toulouse and see this new nephew of mine.”

“You’re very sure Johanna’s going to have a boy!” laughed Berengaria.

“We always have boys in my family,” he boasted. “Arthur, and little Henry, and now, I’ll wager, another Richard!” Berengaria wondered if he were thinking of his own son, Fulk; but he went on cheerfully with his plans. “My mother should be with Johanna by now,” he reckoned, notching off the dates on a tally stick. “We’ll stay for the christening and then we can take her back with us. I don’t like her travelling alone now. The three of us ought to be in England by Michaelmas.”

The castle was much stronger than it appeared, and Mercadier’s mere practice at the butts looked like turning into a long, wearisome siege. Richard’s interest flagged, and he was depressed by a slight return of the ague which plagued him from time to time. And then, one cloudless summer day, the blow fell. One of Raymond’s men came galloping into camp with a message from Eleanor. Richard and Berengaria sprang up to meet him. They clutched like eager children at the letter in his hand. “It ought to be simply
full
of underlining this time!” prophesied Berengaria, almost too impatient to wait while Richard broke the seal. They were too excited to heed the man’s stammered words of warning, and it was quite a long time before they could take in the purport of Eleanor’s stark words—that Johanna’s little son had lived only a few minutes and that Johanna herself—the best loved of all the Plantagenets—was dead.

“But she was so full of life!” protested Berengaria, hating the mocking sunshine and the movement and the flaunting standards her sister-in-law had so loved. She thought of all the months of precious companionship given to her so ungrudgingly in Rome and wailed, “Dear God, what will poor Raymond do?”

Long after it was dark she could hear Richard tramping up and down outside the tent. She checked her own sobs to call to him, and he came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She tried to comfort him, but he just sat there muttering at intervals, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” He could see Johanna again as a laughing child, swinging between his own arm and Robin’s, begging them to take her to Banbury fair. And their father pinching her cheek and telling her she was worth the whole bunch of them.

Depression settled on the whole camp. Blondel went about like a man stunned and Yvette, who was now his wife, became secretly terrified because she too was pregnant. She didn’t want to die in childbirth. She was terribly upset about the Countess, of course, and sorry if she had ever been jealous and horrid to Blondel about the way he worshipped her, but—being a practical little person—all she really wanted was to get back to Fontevrault, where the kind nuns would look after her when her hour came.

Richard and Berengaria ceased to discuss their home-going plans because, in a world without Johanna, every plan seemed empty. Berengaria walked in the fields behind the lines, listened to Yvette’s rosy descriptions of Fontevreult, and wrote long letters to Raymond. And while she hugged her grief, Richard—man-like—turned from his. He left the battering-rams and catapults to Mercadier and sent for the great iron-bound chest in which he kept his building plans. Hour after hour he would pore over the drawings of Château Gaillard, the great castle he had built to protect Rouen.

“Fair, year-old daughter of my brain!” he called it as Blondel helped him unroll the well-worn parchments, clamping them down irreverently with Chalus’s golden vase. Years ago Blondel had watched the great walls and towers grow on parchment beneath a master hand until Richard—haggard in some early dawn—had finally thrown down his quill and cried, “She’ll grin defiance across the Seine when you and I are dust!” Until the road from Gisors was black with laden carts and the Isle of Andely alive with toiling masons and the whole splendid dream rose before their eyes in solid stone, embodying all that was known of military science and all that was finest in one man’s brain. For—unlike his father—Richard had not dissipated his energies in building a plethora of castles, but had patiently, here and there, added, altered, and experimented until he was ready to fling all his architectural knowledge and all his fighting experience into a stronghold that made all the castles of his contemporaries look like antiquated toys.

And now when one petty campaign drew him into another, when for the first time life was becoming a stagnation, he liked to look back to those zestful days when he had spent himself in such absorbing effort. Retracing the cunningly scolloped defences, and the clever, prow-shaped walls of Gaillard’s keep, he forgot about the baseness of Chalus. The afternoon heat shimmered like a skipping rope across the plain, and he had sat inside his tent all day, his linen shirt open at his sunburnt throat. He had not even bothered to put on his mail hauberk. Blondel had picked the thing up and was sitting on a stool just outside the doorway mending a broken thong. He might have called the pages or the armourer, for he was Sir Blondel de Cahaignes now. He was glad of his new title for Yvette’s sake. As he bent over the hauberk in the warm sunshine, their shared life stretched peacefully before the fertile garden of his mind. They would call their first son Richard and perhaps the King himself would stand godfather. They would have other children, of course, who would play round the manor at Horsted, and in the evening he would sing to them and teach them to make ballads so that the exploits of Richard and Robin would not be forgotten. He would be glad to be done with war and to have time to look after his orchards and his woods and his good Sussex steer; but when his time came to die they would cross the stone feet of his effigy to show he had been a crusader. Blondel had just reached the proud absurdity of admiring his own tomb when an arrow whizzed so close to his head that it almost necessitated his being buried there and then. It spat onto the trampled soil just behind him and stood quivering in the tent doorway.

Richard glanced up from his plans. “Someone drew a long bow then!” he remarked absently.

“The arrow’s well barbed, too!” reported Blondel, leaning sideways from his stool to pull at it. “It’s that sniper up there on the portcullis battlement.”

“A useful marksman—if it’s me he wants!” grunted Richard. “Better come inside, hadn’t you?” Like most men who had lived through many emergencies together, they wasted few words.

Blondel’s anxious gaze shifted from the wicked-looking arrowhead in his hand to the gateway of Chalus. The sun was getting low, and already the outline of the castle began to look like a bit of black scenery carved against the roseate sky. It always did in the late afternoon and it was just the hour when their own white tents made such an excellent target. “I’m afraid it
is
you, Sir,” he said. “The man’s been at it all the week. Yesterday, you remember, he grazed your horse when you were inspecting that new battering-ram.”

Richard was only half listening. “Send one of our best archers to pick him off then,” he suggested, forgetting that the sun would be in the man’s eyes. It was so unlike him to forget anything to do with war. It must be because he was thinking of Johanna…Blondel got up to give the order, letting the chain mail fall across the stool on which he had been sitting. The heavy mesh of it slithered to the ground with a metallic sigh, like some spineless, discarded woman…If he too had not been grieving about Johanna, he might have persuaded the King to put it on.