The Lute Player (8 page)

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll even lend you a crown, for there’s nothing but trash here. But mind, it is only a loan.’

I gave her back her purse and went into the solar. The ladies were clustered about the boy, plying him with things to eat. Catherine was even tying a bunch of ribbons to his lute.

‘The princess has asked me to pay you,’ I said to him; and to the women, ‘Wouldn’t you like to see the bear?’ I explained where we had kennelled it and they ran off as excited as children.

Alone with the boy I looked at him again, pictured him in Coci’s place, pictured him as his own man.

‘The princess,’ I said, ‘has suggested that you stay here and be our minstrel. Would you like to do that?’

‘No,’ he said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I would not.’ He then looked very contrite. ‘Such a prompt refusal of such a kind and flattering offer sounds ungracious and ungrateful. I’m sorry but I don’t think it would suit me at all.’

‘If you decide to stay,’ I said, forcing myself to be fair to Berengaria, ‘the princess will buy the bear so that it stays with you.’ And then, to be fair to the boy, I added, ‘But if you prefer to go I will give you the money to buy it yourself.’

‘That,’ he said, ‘would be perfect. Snout-face and I would be grateful to you all our lives. Madam, you are so kind and so generous I cannot find words to express my gratitude.’

I looked at him again and thought of Berengaria’s dream. She had dreams of being in a dark place, therefore it followed that lightness would figure in the symbol of liberation. Or it might be that in her sleep-weighed, poppy-drugged mind some memory of a pictured angel stirred. The boy was rather like a young male angel. She hadn’t dreamed of this particular boy, I thought, stiffening my mind; any fair-haired, light-complexioned boy would have reminded her of her dream and thus been in a degree recognisable. It was all very silly and very superstitious.

‘I think you chose wisely,’ I said. ‘By which I mean, of course, that you chose as I would have done myself.’

He laughed. ‘A nice definition, madam.’

We settled the price of the bear after a little amicable argument; he was plainly anxious not to impose upon me and I was anxious that he should have enough to make the purchase without condemning both himself and the bear to immediate starvation. And as he held out his slim brown hand with its long delicate fingers to take the coins I remembered how it had cupped itself under my elbow and the feelings the touch had roused in me. I thought, Perhaps it is just as well that you are leaving. I might, God help me, get to be rather silly about you and that would be terrible.

I wasn’t wise enough then to know that such a thought shows the thought-of thing to be an already established fact.

He thanked me again and kissed my hand and went swiftly and lithely to the door. I heard him humming on his way down the stairs and I was glad that we hadn’t succeeded in trapping the singing bird and condemned it to a cage where, though safe and cherished, it would rub its wings and pine for the open sky.

I decided not to tell Berengaria of his refusal to stay until he had had time to collect his bear and get away from the castle. So I sat down at my corner of the piece of tapestry and began one of my furious onslaughts. I had done only about six stitches, however, when there was a noise on the stairs and, in a moment or two, the door was thrown open and there was Blanco, holding in his arms the boy who had so lately gone out of the room and, I thought, out of my life. His forehead was broken and bruised and blood was running down into his eye. His upper teeth were clenched down on his lower lip and all round his mouth there was a wide white band of pain. As I ran forward he looked into my face, loosed his teeth and said with wry humour:

‘I told you this place boded me no good!’ And promptly swooned.

Catherine, Pila and Maria were clutching one another and gabbling like geese. They had been at the bottom of the stairs when he missed his footing on the worn steps on the curve and tumbled down at their feet.

Blanco laid him down on the divan nearest the window and, rolling his wide-whited eyes, said, ‘Boy wouldn’t faint for knock on head. Other thing.’ He ran his big black pink-palmed hands over the limp body, shaking his head from time to time until at last he said with a certain satisfaction, ‘Ah. Ankle broke. Listen.’

We could all hear the nasty little grating sound.

Pila, with a little scream, turned away. Maria said, ‘I’m going to be sick.’ Catherine put her arm around Maria and said to me with a defiance that seemed irrelevant, ‘When he broke his head the blood went on her skirt.’

I didn’t feel quite steady myself. There is something so completely against nature in a broken bone and the little grating noise had hurt me, driven a pain into the lower part of my body and down the inner sides of my thighs. But I reminded myself that men had their bones broken every day and that I was a soldier’s daughter.

I said, ‘Run, Blanco, and fetch Ahbeg. Tell him the princess needs him at once.’

Ahbeg was that Saracen physician whom Father had brought back from Sicily and who had fixed the expression of Berengaria’s eyes for all time. Father had retained him in his service despite the protests of the churchmen and the peculiarities of the man himself. Not young at the time of his capture, he was now very old, almost incredibly eccentric and fantastically dirty. He lived by himself in a small room over what we called the Roman Gate because there were some remains of a Roman fortress in that part of the castle; and there he cooked his own food—people said that Christian babies formed part of his diet—and brewed his physics. Until lately he had always accompanied Father on his campaigns but this year when the Aragon campaign began he had said he was too old to travel any more and he had given Father some pills, which Father called ‘horse-balls,’ to swallow each ninth day. ‘They will preserve your health,’ he said, ‘and should any accident befall you I will be with you immediately, even if it cost me my life.’ Father had gone off contentedly; he really had the most implicit faith in Ahbeg. I had been angry and accused Ahbeg of gross ingratitude; but at this moment I was very glad that he was in Pamplona and not in Aragon where Father, according to report, was enjoying superb health. But the old man would only stir from his cell for Berengaria whom he regarded as part of Father. We had proved that some weeks earlier when Pila had swallowed a fishbone which stuck in her throat. I had been obliged to retrieve that with my scissors!

So now, remembering that I had demanded Ahbeg’s presence under what amounted to false pretences, I made the boy as comfortable as I could, at the same time trying not to disturb him, since the setting of a bone even by the most skilful hands is a painful business and the best done while the sufferer is unconscious, and then went and called Berengaria. She did not inquire whether the boy had agreed to stay or not, taking it for granted that no one would refuse an offer of such security, and I did not open the subject. She went and stood by the couch and looked down at the unconscious face with a gaze that was intent, if expressionless. Then she glanced round and summed up the situation of her ladies and said mildly, ‘I hope Gaston retires when you marry him, Maria; knights tend to come back to their wives in worse case than this. As for you, Pila, I thought you went through the siege of Jaca!’ Those words, spoken by me, would have given the ladies grave offence and had many small, exasperating repercussions; from Berengaria they were accepted with proper meekness and within a few minutes Pila and Maria were restored, hovering about, offering suggestions and endeavouring to appear helpful. And within another few minutes Ahbeg arrived.

I realised when I saw the old man that he had had some justification in refusing to accompany Father; he had aged since I last saw him and was now very old, very thin and very frail. Palsy shook his head and his hands and, from the manner in which he peered at his patient, I judged that his sight was failing. He managed, however, to convey his displeasure at being brought from his retreat to minister to a menial and even as he confirmed Blanco’s diagnosis of a broken bone he muttered that any barber would have set it.

‘And lamed the boy for life?’ Berengaria asked.

Thus informed that the boy’s future activity was of importance to his mistress, Ahbeg set to work with his pastes and his bandages and his little wooden splints and worked with such skilful speed that he had almost finished the job before the boy opened his eyes and groaned. He set his teeth into his lip again. Of all the faces clustered above him, his eyes sought out Berengaria’s. As though in response to a question, she leaned forward a little and said almost exactly what I was preparing to say: ‘You’ve had a slight accident. But don’t worry. The bone has been properly set. And we will look after you.’ She laid the extreme tip of her finger on his arm and smiled down at him with her own peculiar smile which always seemed to have something of secrecy about it.

Poor little lute player. I suppose he was lost from that moment. And the strange thing was that she was a woman more sparing of caresses, less lavish with smiles, than any I ever knew.

IV

Of that one day, from the moment when I heard music in the market until the moment when, after long discussion, we decided that the boy had better be bedded in the solar, my memories are perfectly clear and vivid, easily sorted because they run upon a single theme. But of the time that followed, my memories are confused and muddled and untidy, like the back of my tapestry work. Blondel—that was his name, he said—suffered no setbacks and made an ordinary recovery and was soon hopping about on a crutch rigged from a broomstick. Catherine, Pila, Maria, old Mathilde and even Blanco vied with one another in spoiling him and trying to do him little services. I would gladly have tended—and spoiled—him myself if I could have looked after him singlehanded but I have always found it tedious to match my behaviour to that of a mob of people, so I stayed a little apart, though I talked to him, and when I discovered that he could read I let him use my books. I had nine of my own already. Berengaria also held aloof, inquiring each morning, very sweetly, how his ankle did and whether he had slept and thereafter ignoring him.

The bear remained in the kennel for suddenly in the afternoon of the accident, while we were still discussing whether Blondel should be carried down and laid in the place where the pages slept or housed in Blanco’s little room, which had the advantage of being near the guardroom (with the obvious disadvantage too!) or accommodated in the solar, the boy suddenly remembered the animal and its master. So I sent Blanco down to the tavern to find the man and strike the bargain; and what that bear really cost me I shall never know for Blanco stayed in the tavern, too, and came back with no money but with a skinful of ale. In many places he would have been thoroughly beaten but discipline was generally lax in Pamplona.

During all his convalescence I never spoke to the boy of his decision not to stay with us and he referred to it only once, obliquely, when we were talking of something else and he quoted, ‘“Against the worst of fates the best of men is powerless,”’ and then, pointing to his ankle, said, ‘Like me!’ I waited until he could dispense with the crutch and hobble and then limp and then, at last, walk and every day, half in hope and half in fear, I expected him to mention the imminence of his departure. Divided, by this time, in my mind for the thing which I had never dreamed could happen to me had happened; I had fallen in love.

Except upon the tongues of the troubadours this matter of unrequited love makes tedious telling and even in my own memory I take care to skip lightly over the sore places. Most women, I imagine, suffer this form of sickness at one time or another in their lives and not one woman in a thousand marries the man she takes a fancy to. Thrice blessed is she who finds herself able to love the man her father chose for her. I believe there are a few such. For most this thing called “romantic love” is the matter of a song, a poem, an ache in the breast in springtime, a sigh, a few tears in the dark. But, lightly as one may regard this matter of loving and being in love, it has its own agonies; and though I had resented and hated the deformity which precluded me from ever being possessed by a man, from ever having a husband and children of my own, I had long ago decided that this same deformity, having bred cynicism and common sense in me, had at least saved me from the ailment called love. And lately, since Berengaria had lost her heart to her redheaded prince and was suffering from lovesickness with all its concomitant woes, I had rather smugly congratulated myself that this, at least, was a misery I had escaped. Now here I was, waking each morning impatient for the first sight of a boy’s young face; jealous, in secret, of everyone who went near him; cherishing, remembering, enhancing every word we exchanged; touching a book as though it were holy because he had handled it. And another symptom of my state was the access of sympathy, as opposed to mere pity, which I began to feel for my half-sister.

I still found it hard to understand how one could feel overwhelmingly regarding a man of whom one knew so little and with whom one had never exchanged a word or an idea; but I did thoroughly understand how it was that, having felt the fascination of one particular person and allowed his form or image to take grip on one’s imagination, the idea of marrying anyone must needs be extremely repugnant. Berengaria was right, I thought, to put up a fight for what she wanted. In her place I would have fought, too, with just such relentlessness. But of course there was nothing for me to fight about; I had been excluded from those lists from the beginning. I could only preserve—with scrupulous care—my ridiculous secrets, snatch at what small joys came my way and watch with impotent fury my beautiful, my dear, my singing boy precariously balanced between the bog which was the bower and the rock that was Berengaria.

V

Sometimes in the past I had thought it a harsh custom which decreed that well-born boys should be snatched from their mothers’ arms, and from the company of women who had tended them since their birth, and be sent to serve their time in the halls of strangers. Now I saw the sense of the custom. Without it no boy would grow into a man fitted for a man’s world. There is something pervasive and absorbent about a company of women. They receive, they smother, they infect with their own softness. Why, the very pages who attend women are gentler, softer-spoken, more interested in clothes and gossip and less in pranks, altogether more effeminate than those who wait upon men.