The Passionate Brood (32 page)

Thomas kept guard through the weary night. Men came and went and whispered; but towards midnight he had his reward. There was a stir of arrival—lights swaying nearer in the darkness—and approaching in the middle of a gesticulating group, the hooded figure of a woman. At first Thomas praised God, thinking someone had defied the King’s orders and ridden after the Queen and Blondel. Then a raised lantern showed him that the woman was Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The Queen Mother was nearly eighty and reluctantly travelled by litter these days. Two of her sons had been taken from her in their restless hey-day, she had come straight from the death-bed of her daughter, and now the unthinkable thing had just been told her—that Richard, the light of her heart, must be snuffed out in all his splendid strength before she could slip away in her infirmity. She dispersed her informants with a gesture and approached the tent alone.

“Has he been told I am here?” she asked of the heavy-eyed sentry.

Thomas moved aside and held back the tent flap for her. “No, Madam. He has been asleep for hours. And before that he seemed to be wandering.” He followed her respectfully into the tent with a fresh torch, and because he was a person of no account he was privileged to witness their meeting. While he was crushing out the spent torch he saw the King begin to stir and heard him complaining in a thick, drugged sort of voice, “Didn’t I tell you nobody was to come in? Who is it?” And heard the old Queen laugh and say briskly, “The one person who will always come, Richard.” Before Thomas went the King had raised himself to stare joyfully at the beloved figure standing at the bottom of his bed.

The sleeping hour was theirs—the faded striped canvas a curtain against the intrusion of yesterday’s and to-morrow’s world. Eleanor moved round the side of the bed, smoothing the covers and turning his pillow just as she had done when he and Robin were small. “I was on my way up from Toulouse,” she explained, striving to speak normally. When he was tidy and composed she added, “You know about Johanna? You had my message?”

He nodded, but waking to find Eleanor there had been so good that at first he could do nothing but follow her movements with vast contentment.

“It was a boy—and they meant to call him Richard,” Eleanor went on, talking to cover his weakness. “And Johanna wanted me to tell you that you gave her the best husband any woman ever had.”

“Because she was so furious with me at the time,” smiled Richard. “Did she—suffer much?” His own pain was much easier for him to bear than the thought of hers.

“If she did, something seemed to sustain her. And when she came to die—she who loved life so much—her eyes were shining and she held out her arms as if she were going to meet a friend. I know she and Raymond were very happy these last years together. Yet when he had laid her back on the pillow he said, ‘I only warmed myself at the bright, unquenchable flame of her spirit—I never really possessed her.’”

“Poor devil!”

“I never saw a man so heart-broken. Luckily Ida had begged to come and help Johanna. She herself has suffered and seems to understand how he feels and to be able to comfort him. But when he hears about you—” A good sleep had brought more normal colour to Richard’s face so that his mother found it difficult to believe that even the Rouen surgeons would not be able to save him. “You don’t
look
so bad, Dickon!” she said involuntarily.

He laughed almost comfortably. “Lift me up a bit so that we can talk.”

She sponged his face and gave him a drink and added Berengaria’s great embroidered pillow to his own. “Where
is
Berengaria?” she asked, glancing towards the inner tent. She supposed her daughter-in-law to be resting. No one had dared to tell her that he was quite alone.

Richard’s finely shaped hands lay outside the coverlet still holding the little wilted bunch of roses. “Half way to Fontevrault, I hope,” he said, speaking more strongly.

“You mean—she left you—now?”

“Of course not, darling. I sent her. With Blondel and Yvette. It was all arranged before this happened, so that Yvette should get proper attention. Wish I’d thought of it sooner—Berengaria needed a change, you know…”

But Eleanor wasn’t listening to his defence. Her arms went round him suddenly, trying to hold him back. “Oh, why did you send Blondel away?” she cried, in a rare outburst of emotion. “Somehow I feel he would never have let you die!”

Richard held her gently with his good right arm. When she looked up remorsefully she found him smiling at her faux pas. “So they’ve told you?” he said quietly.

Eleanor straightened herself and pushed back the short white curls disordered by her journey. “I met the doctor outside there,” she told him. “He says the poison may take hours. He looks a fool—but probably he’s right.” She stood for a few moments fingering one of the quaint white stags she had embroidered with such happy care and asked with embarrassment, “Richard, would you like me to go now and have them send you a priest?”

To prevent her doing so he imprisoned one of her hands. “No, dear. Not yet. There will be time enough for priests,” he assured her. “And each moment alone with you—is so precious now. Won’t you sit where I can see the torch-light on your hair? I would rather make my last confession to the same dear, worldly woman who heard my first.”

She took off her cloak and settled herself in his chair. “Oughtn’t it to belong to Berengaria?” she said, hugging the preciousness of her hour.

“It is too ugly,” said Richard. ‘‘I’ve made her suffer enough.”

“What you mean is I’m too wicked to shock!” laughed Eleanor. “But perhaps it’s something in the sight of God that you still want me.”

“Haven’t we all wanted you—always?” he said slowly, brought face to face with the realisation of how much she had shaped his life. “You used to evoke for us such splendid, shining dreams. And now I’ve lived some of them—and some of them I’ve tarnished with self-love and lust and hatred. There was Philip—and Chalus whom I hated. And the mother of my fine bastard Fulk—and that little witch Ida—and women whose names I don’t remember. All I know about them now is that nothing they gave me was worth the hurt they gave my wife…”

Eleanor sat very still with the light on her hair and her hands in her lap. Every sin was the heritage of her passionate union with Henry of Anjou. And before ever she had met him, while Louis the Saint was at his prayers, she too had known the thrill of Syrian nights. It was not for her to pass judgment. “There were also the splendid battles when you went crusading for the Christ,” she-reminded him.

“I should have been nearer to Him—if I had been killed in one of them,” sighed Richard. “Somehow I never thought of dying like this—in my bed—safely shut in with you.” He looked round at the shadows shifting over the familiar table and chests that Thomas had tidied. “Why, it might be the old Tower room at Oxford!”

“With Henry and Johanna and John—”

“And Robin and Hodierna and Blondel.” He told over their names slowly as if he were saying good-bye to each. “What Hodierna used to call a Plantagenet party!”

“Blondel will break his heart that he wasn’t here.”

“Yvette will mend it,” prophesied Richard. “Funny, isn’t it, how some people are constructive and others just destructive? I seem to have been breaking things ever since I can remember. My father’s plans—and Robin’s ideals—and Berengaria’s happiness…” His voice trailed off into tiredness. “I meant to do so much—but some adventure always beckoned—or I rushed into some silly quarrel.”

“And then the charmed life failed,” sighed Eleanor, remembering how certain she had been that he would come back from the Crusade. “Well, the old witch kept
her
side of the bargain!”

Richard turned his head so that he could see the gold vase with its incongruous burgeoning of field flowers and raised a hand to flick contemptuous fingers at it. “A paltry thing, Berengaria said, to buy with human lives!” It seemed so short a time since the words were spoken and since her hands were touching it. Her little hands, that he would never again hold against his racing heart. It was unbearable. “I promised to join her at Fontevrault,” he recollected with a wry grimace. “And now, I suppose, it will be only my big, sinful body they will take her. Poor sweet, I wonder if her tears will purge it? Will you come—too—and comfort her?”

Eleanor was determined not to mar this precious hour with her own tears. “Of course,” she promised steadily. “I was afraid you were going to ask me to go back to restrain John.”

“I wish I had done something more definite about Arthur!” muttered Richard. “You’ve never let anyone down, have you?” He spoke with heavy bitterness. “I let Berengaria down—and Robin—and England…”

But that was more than Eleanor could stomach. “You—a failure!” she exclaimed indignantly. “When you’ve made for yourself an imperishable name that will stir men’s minds after most other kings are lumped together as forgotten dust! Richard Coeur de Lion.”

“Robin—and my poor people—would probably prefer me to have been called ‘the Peacemaker’!” smiled Richard.

But Eleanor was of her generation—feudal to her fingertips. “Peacemakers soon get forgotten,” she snapped. “But the citizens of London will probably build a splendid statue of you so that when John has turned them into a nation of shopkeepers they may still see the inextinguishable spirit of their breed in your uplifted sword!”

“I expect Berengaria would like it put up at West-min-stair,” said Richard.

Eleanor suspected that he was making fun of her. “Well, anyhow, Blondel is sure to go back to wherever it is in Sussex and make ballads about us all!” she laughed.

Richard turned his head drowsily on the pillow. “Then I’m sure his children will like best the ones about Robin. About his wrestling at the fair and befriending witches and living in the woods.”

Eleanor saw that his strength was ebbing. It could not matter what she told him now. “If I could sing I could make them a better one about him,” she said deliberately. Richard’s green eyes snapped open and he found that she was not laughing any more. “I’ve always wanted to tell you but Hodierna made me promise I wouldn’t,” she added resentfully.

Richard said nothing but just lay there waiting. The pain in his shoulder was becoming an agony again, but he was glad that the effect of the drug was wearing off because it left his head clear and he felt sure that in a few moments he would see the pattern of his life completed with the piece that was missing.

“It’s about the last instalment of your ransom,” Eleanor began, pleating the velvet of her gown across her slender knee. “It wasn’t at all miraculous really. It was Robin who paid it.”

Richard stared at her through narrowed lids and the roses slipped unheeded from his fingers. “But he hadn’t a groat!” he said. “I had stripped him of everything.”

“Don’t worry about that, my dear,” she said. “He ate your venison every day. And don’t let your conscience nag you about the way you’ve hated Philip and Chalus. That money-grubbing lecher, Barbe, came to England. You didn’t know that, did you? And it was the pair of them who tempted John to steal the exchequer money—to bribe Leopold to keep you in prison.” It wasn’t easy for her to talk about the depth of their infamy. After all, John was still her son and his father had thought the world of him. “We’ve all been too soft with John,” she said. “But Robin caught Chalus taking the money out of the country and appropriated it to pay off your ransom instead.”

Eleanor took joy in telling him the whole story, and Richard—who was dying—lay there and laughed. His hand gripped the embroidered coverlet, and across his belly the leopards he was leaving as a legacy to England heaved to the painful movement of his mirth. The story was Robin’s gift to him, devised with understanding. Besides buying his freedom, it squared accounts with Philip, who had cost him Jerusalem—and with Chalus, who had dared to lift his monkey eyes to a Plantagenet’s mate. And the best part of it was that Robin, whom he had beggared, had done it without killing and without legal status—just by the ingenuity and humour of his breed.

Neither the money nor the freedom mattered much now, but Richard had the assurance of his friend’s love to go out with him on a longer, more hazardous voyage than Acre. Eleanor saw the hard lines smoothed from his mouth, leaving it humorous and tender.

“Now, by the compassionate heart of Christ, I know that Robin forgave me!” exulted Richard, remembering with remorse the broken vow he had made to old Father Christopher on the hilltop of St. Martyr. There had been clean wild thyme, the shivering ecstasy of a lark, and the drifting scent of May. The young tops of the oaks had been touched with gold in the valleys, and the weald had stretched in blue loveliness at his feet. Every spring in England the world would look like that, and somehow he and Robin would always be a part of it.

1. This book was originally published under the title
Like Us They Lived
. It was retitled
The Passionate Brood
for its release in the United States. How is each title appropriate to the novel? Which do you prefer?

2. In the early chapters, Barnes gives us an intimate, familiar view of this powerful royal family. How effective was this in drawing you into the story? What were your early impressions of the family?

3. “Peace!” Hodierna cries at the end of chapter 4. “I doubt if you crazy Plantagenets know the meaning of the word!” This marks the major difference between the Plantagenets and Robin and Hodierna. How does this difference play out in their relationships? Do any of the Plantagenets develop an understanding of peace?

4. In chapter 9, Berengaria says of her aversion to the sight of blood, “One has to be bigger than one’s dislikes,” and Richard is struck by her “unilluminated courage.” Which other characters show this sort of courage in the face of things they dislike?

5. In chapter 12, we see a picture of Richard and Robin at liberty in a scene that goes from jovial banter to constructive debate to serious quarrelling and then finally to Robin’s banishment. How do Robin’s greatest strengths—his love for England, his candid nature, and his devotion to Richard—all play a part in his downfall?

6. How might England’s history have been different if Richard had listened to Robin’s counsel and not gone on his crusade, but stayed to rule and improve his country?

7. Berengaria gives Richard the nickname
Couer de lion
, the “lionhearted.” How does this name suit him? What are some events that take place in the book in which his lionheartedness is apparent? Does this prove to be a positive character trait or a negative one? Or both?

8. Both Eleanor and Richard believe “love necessarily include(s) understanding,” and both are hurt to learn that such is not always the case—Eleanor in her marriage to King Henry and Richard in his friendship with Robin. In what other relationships in the book is there evidence of an imbalance between love and understanding?

9. Even after being outlawed, Robin is never far from Richard’s thoughts. How is Robin still a guiding presence throughout the book, even through his conspicuous absence?

10. Richard says of ruling a country: “A man who can’t burden his conscience with occasional ruthlessness hasn’t the right to rule.” Taken in the context of our own time, do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why?

11. How does John’s position as the youngest and favorite son of Henry II, combined with his lack of an inheritance, form the motivations that impel him to seize power in Richard’s absence?

12. Who was the better ruler: Richard, w
ho was always absent, but had good intentions for his country, or John, who did many things to improve the quality of life in England, but usually for the wrong reasons?

13.
The Passionate Brood
is the story of the establishment of a dynasty (the Plantagenets) and the birth of a nation (England). Barnes does much to show how the individual stories of each are intertwined to form one inextricable history. How might the Plantagenets be seen as the launching point for all of English history that would follow?

14. Margaret Campbell Barnes wrote
The Passionate Brood
during World War II and dedicated it to her son Michael, who was killed during the allied invasion of Normandy. Where in the story do we see both the often noble causes and the devastating losses of war?

Reading Group Guide written by Elizabeth R. Blaufox, great-granddaughter of Margaret Campbell Barnes