The King's Witch (38 page)

A few days later, as she waited by the kitchen door for Richard’s meat, the Templar de Sablé came up to her, casual, as if he himself were there for his dinner.

“ I would have some words with you, Lady.” He said this out of the side of his mouth.

She shivered. It had come to her now. Almost she said,
Then why not send me a reed?
Instead, she said, “No.”

He could not linger; someone would remark on it. But he gave her a foul look and went off. Rouquin was gone again on a raid; she was alone.

With Richard better she went to the hospital in the afternoons. Coming back one evening she thought someone followed her, and turned into a lane, and went by crooked ways back to the palace. But she knew who it was.

So she was relieved when Johanna wrote from Acre, demanding she come; the Queen could not sleep, and Berengaria got headaches. Rouquin would come there soon anyway. Richard sent to his sister that he was going up there sometime in the spring, for yet another of his councils, and in the meantime, now that he was well, he would send Edythe.

ACRE

Edythe said, “Oh, but it’s beautiful.” She walked down the path, now paved with white rock. “My lady, what you have done. It’s like needlework.”

Her small thin face shining, Berengaria stood proudly looking around at the garden. The vine that covered the wall was sprouting red trumpets against the deep green of its leaves, and tall blue cornflowers stood like stars against them. Red and yellow dragonflower filled the space between the pistachio trees and the rosebush, the whole so lushly overgrown that the earth hardly showed. The rosebush was a mass of deep red. Little white daisies bordered the whole like a hem.

Edythe had never seen such a garden. Berengaria had no rosemary, no pot herbs or onions or garlic, no medicines; she had even rooted up the yarrow. Instead she had grown flowers, in masses and clusters, all for their gaudy color. She thought,
Who would spend so much care on mere flowers, except a Queen?

Johanna was sitting down on the stone bench in the middle. “Yes, it’s very pretty.” She dismissed it with a toss of her hand. She gave Edythe a quizzical look. “ What happened to your hair?”

Edythe put her hand to her coif, which had slipped back on the short curly mass of her hair. “Umm—” She felt herself grow furiously hot.

Johanna laughed. “ Well, then. Such a blush.” She made a knowing face. “ I shall not ask to whom you gave this favor. You know Richard is sending us back to the west.”

Edythe had not heard this before. The garden disappeared from her mind; she put her hand in her lap. She blurted, “ To France, you mean.”

Johanna gave her a keen look. “Yes, to France. To Poitiers, really. Mother will want to see us all at once.” She reached out for Edythe’s skirt and pulled her down beside her on the bench. “Sometime this summer. I would you came with me, but I think he intends you to stay.” She picked the edge of Edythe’s coif over her forehead.

Edythe sat stiff on the bench, hardly hearing this. She could not go. She lost everything if she went back to France.

Johanna went on, not noticing. “You should ask him. He would let you come if you asked. He owes you much. He likes you, as much as he likes any woman. And he’s not sick anymore.”

Yet she could not think how to stay here, either, if Johanna left. Her place in the Queen’s court gave her a home, fed her, protected her. The hospital. She swallowed. At least she would have that. Without Johanna’s purse or Richard’s, how long would that last? Johanna said, “Now they will let me marry again. I promise you—what I promised you, before.”

“My lady,” she said. If they went back to Poitiers, could she still be a Jew? Certainly she could not be with Rouquin anymore. Her heart cracked. She said, her voice feeble, “So much has happened here.”

“ What?” Johanna cried. “ What has happened? Except to ruin my poor brother, sicken him body and soul, and muddy up his name? He did everything they asked of him, but they will not honor him for it, not an ounce. Little men. They are such little men. I cannot abide it here. I hate it here.”

Edythe hardly heard this. She could make a hospital, she thought, in Poitiers. There was no such place in Poitiers. More likely, she would go back to tending Eleanor, who ached and wheezed more as she got older, and like her son loved to have her back rubbed; she would spend her afternoons mixing potions for the other court women. Sewing and spreading gossip. They would marry him to an heiress. She would see him, Count of this or that, only in crowds. They would marry her to some stranger.

“Of course,” Johanna was saying, “then I might have another baby.”

Edythe turned to her, intent. That had occurred to her, although not about Johanna. “ I hope so, my lady. I do hope so.”

Richard came up from Jaffa, and they met him at the wharf. Only four ships had come with him, and he was shouting to his sister from the small boat even before he landed.

“I had to leave the rest of the fleet back there. Saladin tried to sneak in—” He leaped up onto the wharf, still wearing boat shoes but in his mail and with his helmet under his arm. The court dipped and bobbed into its homage of bows and murmurs and bent necks. Standing behind his sister, Edythe recognized his high color, his snapping excitement; he had won some fight.

His voice sang on. “When I was on the boat but still in the harbor. I’d only left a little garrison, everybody wanted to get up here, I guess the stews are cheaper here.” He bent and kissed Johanna’s cheek. Edythe looked past him, at the men coming with him; Rouquin was not one of them. Richard’s exuberant voice continued.

“Saladin never quits. He sent his first ranks into the city before I was even out beyond the surf. He must want Jaffa very badly. But he isn’t going to get it.” He bowed to Berengaria, and started off down the wharf. “ Rouquin pulled all the garrison into the palace and sent a priest to swim to my ship. I had to wade back and clear the bastards out. We chased them halfway to the hills.” He strode away down the wharf, and they all pattered after him. Edythe hung back, looking at the galleys.

Johanna said, “So you left Rouquin back there? You’re still not getting along?”

“ He’s in one of his fits.” He turned his head, looking for her. “ He needs Edythe to give him a potion, to change his humor.” His eyes glittered.

She said, mildly, “My lord.” She could feel her cheeks burning; she lifted her skirts to go after them, disappointed. The grooms came forward with their horses, and they rode away to the citadel.

Halfway there the street filled with shouting men. Richard raised his hand, as if to greet a welcome, and a shower of rotten fruit bounced around him.

“ Traitor! Oath breaker!” The crowd screamed up and down the street. Swiftly the knights formed up around the court in a tight wall, and a charge cleared the way. Richard’s hand was at his side. His face was like a stone. They fought their way through the jeers and volleys of dung and offal to the Citadel of Acre.

“ It’s actually very pleasant out here in the evenings,” Johanna said. “And far from the street.” She led him down through the yard toward the old garden.

Richard hardly heard her, his ears still full of the shouting back there, not the words, but the noise. His nerves jumped. As if he were carried outside himself and looked back he realized what the street mob saw: a man who had failed the Crusade. All those fine, stupid words. Jerusalem the impossible. Here around him his sister, still laying her adoring look upon him, his stranger wife.

“There’s another letter from Mother. Bad news.”

And that. He sat on a bench and tore the letter open. “From Her Grace the Duchess of Aquitaine to her beloved son Richard Duke of Aquitaine and King of England, greeting.” No sweetness of inquiry after his health, the weather, God’s blessings on him. Straight into the gut.

“ I have warned you about John and now it is coming to pass. My spies tell me he has promised Philip the great fortress of Gisors if Philip will recognize him as Duke of Normandy. They are gathering an army. And worse: They are in constant consult with the Duke of Austria, whom somehow in your charm and wisdom you have succeeded in giving a deadly insult, and who says you are cut down now, and will pay like any other man.”

Richard said, aloud, “ If I ever tremble at the Duke of Austria, put me out with a bowl to beg.”

“Therefore, my dear son, come not home in any way to put yourself within his reach, or Philip’s either, for that matter, but come home while there is still a home left to you.”

He tossed the letter down. Everything was falling apart. The women talked around him, but in his mind he still heard the shouting in the street.

He could not even leave now. He had to get some arrangement from Saladin, some formal acceptance of his gains, or everything he had fought for would go up in the flames of these little local feuds. There was Guy, who without him had nothing, and whom, in spite of himself, Richard had come to like. Humphrey. He began to plot the way home—by ship, perforce, maybe to Rome, or southern France. Damn the Duke of Austria, whose face he could not even remember, although he remembered at the fall of Acre telling Rouquin to tear his banner down.

Johanna chattered on beside him. He whipped his gaze around to her. “Do you never shut up? Send for something to drink.”

Her face crumbled. With a sniff she leaped up and went off. Now he would have to deal with that, too. He saw that everything happening to him was of his own making; he was damned, the devil in him well pleased at all his ruin, damned and hopeless.

He lifted his head, and for the first time the color around him burst in on his attention. He looked dazed around him. This garden had not been here before. The living colors, reds and blues and streaks of white, flooded his eyes, magnificent, overwhelming. For a moment, even his mood lightened.

Some idea about this lay in the back of his mind, and he turned to Berengaria, on the next bench.

“Did you do this?”

The girl blinked at him and smiled. “Yes, my lord. Do you like it?”

“You are very clever,” he said, his greatest compliment to a woman. But he did not look at the garden again; he looked at her, as if he saw her for the first time, and after a moment, he leaned toward her and kissed her.

In the morning, after he had cozened his sister back to sweetness, Edythe came in to give him a potion. She felt the pulse in his throat, one hand on his shoulder, handling him, as she often did, as if she were plumping chickens in a market stall. No King at all, but a skinful of humors. He said, “Johanna says you want to ask me something.”

She stepped back, her eyes wide. “ I—I don’t know what.”

“She says you would ask to go back to France with them, but you are too dutiful. Her word.”

Her eyes widened; she had interesting eyes for a woman: dark, prominent, the heavy upper lids fringed with black lashes. She whispered, “I would stay here, my lord.”