Almodis (9 page)

Dia and I had helped her to ply him with fine wine until he was near unconscious and then, she told us, she straddled him in their bed and consummated their marriage. ‘It was so awful, Dia, I felt like a succubus, a prostitute,’ she said and I did feel for my poor Lady. ‘When it was over,’ she told us, ‘he spent the entire night on his knees beneath the crucifix with his rosary.’ Still these
horrible encounters had been enough to get her with child. I know that many nights my poor, dear Lady creeps to the
garderobe
and weeps silently there.

Audearde and Rorgon entered the hall and Almodis introduced them to Geoffrey and Agnes of Anjou. They took their seats and broke their fast but were too awe-struck by their unexpected
visitors
to offer much in the way of conversation. Hugh still had not come and the silence in the hall began to feel uncomfortable.

‘I hear there has been some fighting around Mon Coeur,’ said Almodis eventually. ‘I hope you were not much engaged or injured my Lord,’ she said to Geoffrey.

‘Oh very engaged,’ he said nonchalantly and laughing with Agnes, ‘but injured? Not at all!’

Hugh entered and strode up the hall to join them. The
necessary
welcomes were exchanged again.

‘I come to claim your fealty Lusignan,’ Agnes pronounced at last. ‘Eudes is dead. Slain at Mon Coeur two days ago. My son is Duke of Aquitaine and takes the name Guillaume VII. We claim your kiss of peace as Regents of Aquitaine.’

I saw my mistress bow her head briefly and a cold chill passed through me. She had played with Eudes and loved him in place of her own missing brothers. I remembered his kindness to her at her wedding. I prayed that he had died swiftly and easily. Geoffrey was regarding my Lady with intense interest. A horrible vision rose up in my mind of Geoffrey slicing Eudes’ neck, hacking into his bright young face.

Hugh ordered more wine to be poured before responding to give us all time to adjust to this shocking news. I saw my Lady’s gaze on Agnes’ jewelled fingers curled around the fragile pink glass of one of the palm beakers that Count Ramon had sent to her.

‘I will give you my kiss of fealty Lady Agnes, Lord Geoffrey,’ Hugh said with careful formality. ‘My brother can officiate for us.’

Agnes nodded and then she and Geoffrey turned their eyes very deliberately onto my Lady. The castle lord had capitulated easily but the lord had a Marcher wife. She is a brave lady and she did not betray her feelings to the likes of them.

‘How old are Pierre and Guy now?’ she asked in a neutral voice. She and I had held Agnes’ baby twins and played mother to them. We had followed them anxiously around the bailey at Montreuil-Bonnin as they learnt to walk.

‘Duke Guillaume VII and his brother are ten,’ Agnes said,
giving
her plenty of time as regent. Her smile was close to a gloat. Geoffrey tapped his pink beaker for more wine.

‘Give Lord Geoffrey a larger glass, Bernadette,’ Almodis said. ‘This pink frippery is too small for him, and Lady Agnes too.’

I guessed that she was thinking if only she could save Aquitaine, La Marche and the South so easily from them, as she saved her favourite beakers. I had heard Lady Almodis speak often about Agnes’ certainty that she would rule Aquitaine despite the many heirs the old duke had left in the way of that ambition, and now they were both proved right. Eudes had been duke for barely a year before Geoffrey had slain him.

Geoffrey and Agnes stayed for two nights and my Lady arranged hunting and hawking, feasting and talk of the goings on in the Holy Roman Empire. Dia sang for them and Agnes, greatly
admiring
her, would have taken her off with them if Almodis had not pointed out that she was on loan from the Count of Barcelona. ‘I will let him know of your admiration for his
trobairitz
,’ Almodis said, effectively closing down Agnes’ acquisitive attempt.

One night, going to undress Lady Almodis for bed, I came across Lord Geoffrey standing very close up against my Lady, she with her back to her chamber door, and he running his hand and his eye round the curve of her belly. My Lady had a
curious
look on her face, between fear and pleasure. They looked up and saw me and then Geoffrey stepped away from Almodis, as I heard Regent Agnes’ steps behind me. I hoped that I had blocked her view.

The best way to create truth is to assert it, I have read, and I do believe in the power of the written word, both in war and in love. Despite my offers of a fine chamber within the castle, my love wordster, Dia, has insisted on living in a tiny house in the village. I am curious to see her home and she has invited me there for
dinner. The path up to her door switches back on itself in a steep zig-zag. ‘If I’m not there when you arrive, Lady Almodis,’ she’d said, ‘just let yourself in. I won’t be far behind you.’ I knock and wait, knowing though, that nobody will answer. You can always tell, standing outside a door, whether there is anybody in the house or not. Absence has a certain dull presence of its own that you can always feel.

So I turn the doorknob and open the door straight onto the back of a heavy dark curtain that I scrape away from in front of my face. I pull the door closed behind me, an impostor, an intruder, despite Dia’s words of permission.

As I step into the room the curtain falls back, keeping out the draughts. The room is dark and cold nevertheless. Thin sticks of wood are piled next to the empty fire grate. Two chairs covered in scuffed brown leather hold their arms out to the fire. It is so dark in the room I hesitate on the threshold waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom, but the gloom persists. A cheap, spherical, glass lamp hangs low over a table between the chairs, its wick unlit. The stark form of the lamp looks jarringly out of place amidst the genteel shabbiness and fuzziness of the rest of the room.

I peer around curiously. If Dia were here, she herself would be the focus of my attention but now I can look carefully at what surrounds her in her life, in her work of composing. A faded pink, floral shawl is thrown over an uncomfortable looking blue day-bed. A table is covered in and surrounded by piles of
parchments
. Dia has to practice both her voice and her instrument for several hours every day, and it is a great pleasure to me to have her melodies around me so much.

Struggling to rise in the far corner and looking like upholstery himself is Gaston, Dia’s ancient dog. He is near blind and deaf and his black coat is matted in long dreadlocks like a hermit. It is impossible to see his eyes, and in the dark room he is merely an indistinct darker area. Dia adopted him after the death of his previous owner, an old, old man from the village. Eventually Gaston makes it across the room to sniff my hand. Satisfied that he knows me he shuffles back over to his green blanket on the floor and more or less falls back down on to it.

I hear flies buzzing, disturbed by my entry, and look to see
where they are chasing each other through dust motes floating in a strip of light from one of the windows. A few books and scrolls fail to fill the bookshelf. So few books for such a wordsmith. I have noticed an element of self-denial in Dia’s character and now it gazes at me in the thinness of her belongings. I try to imagine being Dia, living her unseen life in this room.

More scrolls occupy the small low table before the fire. Dried purple flowers stand in a jar on the mantelpiece. A wooden
lute-like
instrument with a broken string is hanging from a nail above a very dark brown, oversized chest. Dia told me that in the past she had a lover: a musician who beat her, but she did not tell me more about this man who has left so many scars on her heart. I guess that there is perhaps some association of this broken
instrument
with him.

There are no mementos of family or friends anywhere in the room. Despite our many warm conversations, I know so little about her. She is estranged from her mother; her father is dead; she spent some time working in the hospital in Salerno; she has toured many places in the company of other troubadours: the Basque Country, the kingdom of Aragon, Italy, Sicily. These are sparse details for someone who has lived twenty-three years. There must be more to know. I search for clues to the mixture of profound sadness and private joy that I have observed in her. I look around the room, feeling as if I am stealing her life, rifling through her things.

I know that she keeps an eye on the old man in the village who sits by the fountain with his hose awry, drool dribbling down his chin, his mind long gone and no family to care for him. When we go to the market together I have noticed how she looks out for the grimy young man, a lunatic, who is always pacing up and down between the two queues of people and carts waiting to enter the gate. Every day, all day, he is in the same place, begging, wearing a thick hood pulled over his head even in sweltering
sunshine
. He too has lost his mind and has nobody. Dia always gives him something – a coin, a small flagon of wine, a bag of nuts, and a few words. He recognises her and mutters incomprehensibly in response to her queries about how he is, while she blithely holds up the people and carts behind her.

I notice a sketch on an easel standing in the meagre light by the window and move over to look at it. The pencil drawing is a detailed image of the lined and beautiful face of an old man: one of the damaged people she acquires a responsibility to nurture in small ways that probably make very big differences to their lives. It must have taken a long time to draw this. One day? One week? And all the time she sketched him, no doubt she spoke softly with him of his hard life. Perhaps he is dead now.

I hear a greeting shouted in the square below and move over to the window, careful not to step on Gaston in the gloom and see that Dia has just arrived back. She doesn’t look up to see me haunting her house but is concentrating on reaching for her shopping baskets. There is a lurid brightness in the air that occurs just before rain. The ugly new fountain in the square below spurts its water with an incessant rhythm.

I move quickly through a colourful beaded curtain off the living room, wanting to cover the whole apartment before she arrives, and I emerge blinking into the tiny bright kitchen after the cave-like living room. I am looking at a spectacular view of the wide river below. The sound of water pounding over the rocks is thunderous in here and easily drowns out the pompous fountain. The water rushes in thick sheets looking like a solid surface of glass. Huge black tree trunks are snagged on jagged boulders. A man on an ass clops along the narrow road running alongside the river, waving a greeting to the fishermen. Dia’s tiny balcony is crammed with brimming flower pots, bowls of crumbs for the birds, saucers of water for the lizards. I feel an envy for the freedom and independence of her life.

From up here I can look down on her wood pile neatly stacked in a small courtyard below. It reminds me of her surprising
argument
with Madou, the woodman. It seemed so out of character for her. I had to be a go-between, because neither of them would speak directly to the other. When he finally gave in and came to deliver some wood to her, instead of repairing the argument as I expected, Dia wound it up even further and they argued some more.

‘Why are you leaving it like this all over the road? Why don’t you help me stack it as you did before? What’s up? I’m not paying
you enough?’ she yelled at him, as I watched appalled at what I hoped would be a reconciliation with someone who is, after all, the only woodman in the valley.

‘You pay for the wood, not my labour or time!’ he yelled back.

‘It’s not good enough! I’m looking for another supplier.’

I shifted from foot to foot in the cold as they shouted and gesticulated at each other, knowing that she had already tried and failed to get another supplier. Madou jumped down from the cart and came up close and whispered something in her ear. They smiled at each other and suddenly the fight was over and they were friends again. I was amazed to see her, usually so adroit, turn suddenly coy. Was I an awkward witness for some kind of
foreplay
? Madou rode off and I helped her stack the wood. She told me that an Andalucian deals with emotions and men in a different way to an Occitan woman.

‘
Bonjour
!’ she calls now, pushing her way through the brown curtain, knowing too the difference between the feel of presence and absence in a house. I move back through the beaded kitchen curtain to greet her. Bulging bags are hanging along her arms with warm-smelling baguettes protruding like spines.

Dia is very slender with olive skin contrasting against the
enormous
mass of her long, black, tumbling hair. She has a kind of fragile beauty that forces your eyes to linger there: on her face, her brown eyes, her laughing mouth. Physically she is frail but her energy and will are like sinews. I have watched how she gives
precious
emotion and care to the dying and the dead, to women in labour, to distraught children. Despite her surface cheerfulness, I feel that she is always trailing a grief that she deals with every day, her own secret grief.

She kisses me three times on the cheeks. ‘
Bonjour, bonjour
,
Almodis
.
Ça va? Oui, ça va bien aussi.’
There is an effortless style about her in her threadbare clothes. I have tried to give her new clothes, but she stubbornly continues to wear her own old ones. She moves into the kitchen with Gaston at her heel, rumpling his dreadlocks and vainly attempting to tuck her own hair behind an ear with one finger. She tips the contents of her bags onto the small table with relish. Garlic, onions, mushrooms, steak, potatoes, and then, an
incredibly smelly cheese. We clasp our hands over our noses and mouths, and she manoeuvres the cheese quickly with her free hand onto a saucer and rushes out onto the balcony with it. ‘
Oui
!
This
we have to put outside!’ She comes back in laughing with me. ‘It will
taste
fan-
tas
-tic though, you’ll see.’ She wraps her Andalucian mouth awkwardly around her perfect Occitan.

‘Ah you brought some wine,’ says Dia, ‘let’s have some right away and get the fire going. It’s so chilly – brrr!’ She rubs her hands up and down her thin arms theatrically and the still house is suddenly, vividly, alive with her.