Almodis (12 page)

A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad. Lady Almodis read that out to me this morning from Saint Gregory and he’s right: back here in Toulouse and who’d have thought it. A great crowd of people came out to see her when she rode into the city to become the count’s new bride, strewing flowers in our path, cheering. The reputation of a good thing precedes it. I’m become maid to the most important
countess
in the whole of Occitania, Piers says.

I’ve been sent to the market for blue thread and it’s crowded with the visitors for the Easter Assembly. I halt abruptly,
balancing
on one leg to wiggle my shoe around my foot and dislodge a small stone that is sharp under my heel. Around me are the sounds of the city: the jokes and enticements of stall-holders, gulls excited by the food on the wharf, fishermen and traders calling out, throwing their heavy ropes, bringing their ships to the pier. Toulouse is not a warrior court, like Lusignan and La Marche, and Count Pons is no warrior. His main interests are his belly, his wine, and bedding my mistress.

‘Your Lusignan brats should have stayed with their father,’ he told her. ‘Your business here is to get an heir to Toulouse.’

‘My Lusignan children are the sign of how well I will do that,’ she said, mildly. ‘The boys will stay with me until they are seven, as is custom, and then I have arranged for Hugh to be trained with my brother in La Marche and for Jourdain to enter the
priory
in Lusignan as a novice.’ Her tone was bland but it brooked
no argument. It was a trick I’d seen her learning in her battles with Audearde. I looked to my new master, to see if it would work so well here.

My mistress is looking very fine today: her dress is a deep dark red like the best wine with grey fur around the neck, and her pale blue underdress peeking through the slits in her sleeves. Pons looked her over and nodded his approval of her arrangements for the boys. ‘The girl is keeping me from your bed.’ (The Church orders that a man must keep from his wife whilst she suckles a child.) ‘Send her to the nuns at Saint Gilles.’

‘Yes, my Lord,’ she says, all seeming innocent. ‘I have arranged a wet-nurse for Melisende.’

I
knew that she had done no such thing. Nor would she.

I hurry back with the thread, in case I’m missing a new event or argument, but Almodis and Dia are still sitting in the spring sunlight, sewing. I have new clothes and ribbons to match my grand status as countess’ maid and, passing Almodis’ mirror, I admire my dress.

‘Stop your vain twirling, Bernadette, and get on with tidying this room.’

‘Sorry Lady, I was relishing this dress you gave me.’

‘You look very fine in it.’

I reach for a broom again. I’m sure that dust breeds. One day or another given its persistence dust will probably begin to gain the upper hand. She’s been sharp with me these few days but she’s paying a high price for her change in status with that old man in her bed.

She turns back to her conversation with Dia, her voice low. ‘I felt like a virgin on my wedding night. I
was
near-virgin.’ I sit down quietly, hoping she won’t clam up because I’ve returned. ‘I hoped, since he is an old man, that he might be as little inclined to bedding as my first husband, but I was not lucky in that. I am the blade and you are the chalice, he told me,’ she says, smirking in disgust.

Listening to her putting a brave face on it, I remember her standing in the bedchamber on her wedding night here, her
yellow
hair loosed down her back. I remember how Pons
commanded
that her floor-length red cloak be removed, and he had
made her stand there shivering, naked, on display to a roomful of strange men. I was glad that Dia and I had spent all that time the day before applying a depilatory of cucumber, almond milk and quicklime for she looked gorgeous.

‘Courage, Lady,’ I whispered in her ear, brushing her hand gently as I passed, leaving the room, with the rest of the wedding party.

‘When I heard the rustle of
his
cloak falling round his ankles,’ she continues with her story to Dia, ‘I kept my eyes down, seeing only the dark brown fur beneath my toes, the edge of the quilt I first took to Hugh in Lusignan.’

She tells a good story, my Lady. I never get much work done, listening to it all. ‘But even so,’ she continues, ‘I could not avoid seeing Pons’ gnarled feet and the white sagging skin of his thin legs and knees.’ She pauses, and I straighten out the moué of
disgust
on my mouth. ‘At least he was done with me fast, grunting like a pig that had been stuck and then snoring. I pulled my arm out from under him where he was lying heavily on it. I thought of Hugh,’ she says, looking up and glancing at us both, ‘and I
confess
that tears trickled out of the corners of my eyes and pooled on the pillow at the sides of my head.’

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. Part of me wants to hear this and part of me doesn’t.

She sighs heavily. ‘I wonder how many nights I must endure before I conceive. My Lord spends one quarter of his time complaining about the toothache, one quarter so drunk his speech is slurred, another quarter pawing me, and the last
quarter
telling me what an illustrious lord he is and what a lucky girl I am.’

Dia grimaces. I haven’t seen my Lady laugh sincerely since we set foot in Toulouse.

‘I made this calculation of his time last night,’ she goes on, with a horrible cool in her voice, ‘while he claimed his marriage debt
again
, and I examined a brown stain on the ceiling, doing my sums.’

Dia is looking down at her hands and her embroidery lying neglected in her lap, like mine.

‘I keep my face turned away to the wall or to the ceiling,’
Almodis says. ‘The pale brown stained patch above the bed is shaped like two mountains, one smaller than the other.’

‘Shall I get that stain sorted out?’ I burst in, finding it hard to bear her litany of nuptial distress, and she looks up, startled at my interruption. She’s forgotten I’m there, listening. ‘Piers could whitewash it or see if there’s a leak in the roof.’

‘No, no, Bernadette. I like my stain. What would I look at
without
it? Girl, he calls me!’ she says, indignant, ‘when I am a
twice-married
woman with three babies.’

She is just a girl though, barely twenty and bright as spring to his wrinkled winter. He has a large bald patch on the top of his head, like a monk’s tonsure, but it’s the only monkish part of him.

She turns back to Dia. ‘I’ve given him his bride-nights, and God knows what it has cost me, but I’ll not be subject to his every desire. I couldn’t bear it.’

‘What will you do then?’

‘I will keep him rationed with his visits to my bed. I must get him an heir as quick as can be and then I will keep him at arm’s length. Well, hall’s length would be better!’ she laughs at that with us. ‘After I have given him his heir perhaps you can find out some herbs to cool his ardour?’

‘I already know them: chaste tree, coriander and lettuce seed will reduce his urges, and I can make an
aiguillette
, a spell that acts like a ligature around the genitals.’

‘Excellent,’ she says, smiling broadly with her broad mouth.

When we first came here I thought she would never rise above her grief over Lord Hugh. Her baby daughter took falling tears as much as milk when she fed her. She is as desperate to keep Pons from her bed, as she was to get Hugh in it.

‘You will be with child, soon,’ Dia soothes her, standing and combing her hair with a finely carved ivory comb that the Count of Barcelona has sent her as a new wedding gift, ‘then he will have to leave you be.’

Almodis swings her head miserably from side to side, so Dia is forced to pause in her rhythmical combing. ‘He was married to Majora for eighteen years without issue.’

Dia resumes, slowly pulling the white teeth of the comb through the shimmer of my Lady’s hair. ‘It will be different with you. You will see. You will be with child soon.’

Tonight we have stitched long into the evening by candlelight. My eyes feel like they are hanging out of their sockets. I huff and lay the dress aside to refocus. I’m pleased with this other tawny gown my Lady has given me now she has new ones. I’ve had to shear seven inches off the bottom of it, she being such a willowy giant compared to my more womanly height, but I can stitch that strip to my brown dress that is frayed and stained at the hem. There’s enough to edge the cuffs and the neck too for my Lady wears her skirts full so that her dresses can easily accommodate her pregnancies when they come.

‘So what did you find out this morning Bernadette?’

‘About what my Lady?’

‘About the city, its people. Out with all the gossip. You were gone three hours and I assume that you now know everything there is to know and are about to tell me!’

Well she’s not wrong. ‘The Prior of Saint Antoine has a
mistress
and two children,’ I begin. Almodis and Dia laugh. ‘The other ecclesiasticals hereabouts seem to be godly and they say that Durand, the Abbot at Moissac follows the Benedictine code most strictly. There’s plenty of scandal though about Guifred, the Archbishop of Narbonne. Apparently he’s more warrior lord than man of God. He girds his waist with iron instead of rope and keeps a company of knights and a noose of castles around Narbonne. His scribes are busy writing pious frauds in the Carolingian archives of the city.’

‘Any more?’

‘Well, it seems your Lord has taken many women in his time, poor women who only last the hour that is.’

‘That’s no surprise.’

‘The people in the market say his nephew Bertrand has been expecting to inherit Toulouse and has hefty mortgages with the moneylenders against that expectation. His first wife, Majora, had a son …’

‘What?’ she explodes.

‘But, but,’ I hold out my hand to still her, ‘he was badly born. Majora was only thirteen when she birthed him.’

‘Badly born – how?’

‘He could not talk or walk when it was long past time and he dribbled all day and when he was five and the doctors could make no sense of him they sent him away to be looked after by the monks at Saint Gilles and Lady Majora broke her heart with
crying
and never showed signs of any more babies.’

‘Well, does he live?’

‘I don’t know. The woman I was talking with said that all the people assume he died as he was such a sickly thing and has never been heard of since.’

‘Send Piers to Saint Gilles tomorrow,’ she says. ‘I want to know if this son of Pons lives still and what his condition is.’

Her plots with Dia don’t seem to be doing her that much good. I could have given her better advice about managing a husband but I don’t get a look in with the Spaniard around her all the time. I’m just good for fetching and carrying, for jiggling mewling babies. Do this, do that, Bernadette. I’m tired out each night in my bed. I close my eyes and like a mere blink it’s morning again and I’m supposed to jump and run and carry all over again. I feel like an old lady. I’d like to say no just for once. No, I won’t light that fire with my knees pricked by the rushes and my eyes streaming with the smoke; no, I won’t run to the buttery and then bring that
goblet
of wine up the long staircase with my thighs aching and aching with each winding step; no, I won’t have a baby screaming red in the face on each arm and in each ear; no, I won’t stop kissing Piers in the stable and come running because you are calling out of a window crossly ‘Bernadette where have you got to
now
?’; no, I won’t get out of my warm bed and go running in the cold
morning
to the well and chip the ice into a bowl to warm next to the fire that you might dip your white fingers in it and splash a little, a very little, on your pink cheek.
No I won’t
. If only!

We have a contradictory system regarding Count Pons and I’m fearful that we’ll accidentally murder him. Sometimes we’re
controlling
his ardour to give her relief and other times I’m mixing up potions to help him quicken her womb and what potions they
are! This morning I reduced the liver and testicles of a small pig to powder and mixed it with wine. I had to grind it for ages with my wrist aching and the smell something awful. Then we had to find a way to conceal its stench in strong wine to get it down him. My Lady wears a pair of weasle’s testicles in an amulet hanging around her neck and lodged between her bosoms that Dia says will get her with child. A lot of nonsense I’m thinking but my Lady says that Dia trained with the healers in Salerno and she knows her business.

At Lusignan my mistress commanded a small household but here she commands a royal court, bustling with all manner of people, doing all manner of work: solving legal disputes, scribing oaths, keeping archives, fleecing pilgrims and all the other
commerce
of the city.

Count Pons likes to exercise his right to flagellate servants and children for any violations and especially if the servant is a young woman that he can have stripped to the waist before him. I keep well out of his way. My Lady had an argument with him when he tried to punish her son Hugh. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t have it.’

‘It is my right to whip any servant, child or
wife
,’ he shouted at her, ‘who defies me.’

She didn’t reply, just stared him out till he retreated. Indeed I think he is a little afraid of her. No one, and especially no woman, stood up to him before, like she does.

Piers has returned with news that Majora’s son died in his
eleventh
year and is buried in the cemetery of Saint Gilles Abbey. My Lady and Dia both received letters this morning. Almodis’ brother wrote to tell her Fulk has died and Geoffrey is Count of Anjou. ‘Good,’ she says wickedly. ‘Fulk Nerra was an evil man and it is long since Geoffrey needed the power to himself. Agnes will be preening. I hate to think of him with her.’ She has a letter from Raingarde, saying she will visit with her husband soon. Dia’s letter is from Barcelona and she tells us that Count Ramon has been successful in subduing the revolt of his baron, Mir Geribert, and Ramon’s Countess, Elisabet, has borne him a son named Berenger.