Almodis (17 page)

‘Wonderful!' says Raingarde, truly amazed.

Sounds like a lot of work, says I, in the privacy of my own head. Golden violets and troubadours indeed. There'll be pregnant maids and broken marriages like as not. I can't stop myself from tutting out loud but Almodis merely smiles at me, amused at my disapproval as usual. 

‘If all the world were paper, and all the sea were ink …’ Lady Almodis always begins her lessons with her children this way and they shout it with her, giving me a headache. It’s a quotation from Dhuoda.

We are on an outing and the twins Hugh and Jourdain are fighting as usual. They are a deal of trouble for me to look after and keep from irritating the master. Not all twins love each other it seems. These two are not alike, as my Lady and Raingarde are. At five they are already showing a difference in size. It seems that Hugh got all the nourishment in the womb and Jourdain less. Hugh likes to bully his brother and Jourdain is of a gentle cast of mind. Of all of them, he follows his mother in her liking for dusty old books. My Lady says that he will go to the monks at Lusignan Priory when he is seven, if he wishes. She says it is clear that his brother will not share power in Lusignan when he grows up, and so that would only store up trouble for them both when they are men. She is teaching all her children to read and write. I can’t see the point myself. Hugh will be Lord of Lusignan, Guillaume will be Lord of Toulouse and Raymond of Saint Gilles, so what’s the reason? I told her that lords don’t need to read and write where I come from. They have scribes to get their fingers inky but she told me and the children, ‘An unlettered ruler is an ass. That is what Fulk Count of Anjou wrote to old King Louis of France, and it was twice a joke since the King could not even read the message’. She said I could learn with them but I haven’t got time
to fill my head with alphabets and numbers when I’ve got five
little
children to keep out of Pons’ way and my Lady to look after.

‘You are brothers knit together with my blood,’ she tells Hugh, Jourdain, Guillaume and Raymond often. The sons of Hugh and the sons of Pons. ‘When you are all grown up, you will swear your oaths using my name, I Hugh, son of Almodis or I, Raymond, son of Almodis and you will swear allegiance to each other, to support and help each other.’ They love her stories of what will happen when they grow up.

‘What about me mother?’ says Melisende.

‘We shall find you a beautiful and kind lord to marry,’ says Almodis, ‘and you will be the chatelaine of your own castle and have many sweet children.’

Today, she says is a maths lesson. ‘See, here is our lesson!’ Almodis declares, throwing her arm up towards a steep path that winds up a cliff face to the priory perched high above the
village
of Ambialet and the meandering River Tarn. The children are frothing excited around her. They spread outwards from her knees, five blond heads of varying heights, looking all the world like an extension of the gold lace train of her dress: Hugh and Jourdain, Guillaume, Raymond and Melisende with her long curls, just like her mother’s. I am not looking forward to
huffing
and puffing up that steep path, no doubt having to carry
three-year
-old Raymond, some of the way, and he’s already solid muscle and heavy so I will start to feel his weight walking uphill on a hot summer’s day. The sun shines, dancing on the river, over to our left. How could a hot hill climb be a maths lesson, I wonder, and how can the children be so delighted at the idea of a maths lesson anyway?

‘Shall I wait here for you, my Lady?’ I ask hopefully, gesturing towards a wooden bench at the foot of the hill.

‘No, no, Bernadette, you may learn some maths too today,’ she says, making the children laugh.

‘Where’s the maths, Mother?’ Hugh shouts and they all chime in noisily as his chorus, chanting his question, over and over. ‘Where’s the maths, Mother! Where’s the maths,
Mother!
’ they yell.

‘Follow me!’ she lifts the hem of her skirts in one hand, skirts
I’ll be cleaning tomorrow, and sets off up the path with them running around in front, behind, skipping, shouting, and me, trying to keep up. Tiny brown lizards zigzag up the rocks away from us.

‘Don’t go near that one!’ Almodis warns Raymond, as he makes towards a larger green lizard. ‘The big ones bite and they clamp on and they don’t let go of your arm or finger until you kill them or give them beer, and we haven’t got any beer with us.’

‘Got my knife, though,’ he says, lifting the little scabbard hanging from his belt, to show her.

‘Still,’ she tells him, ‘today is maths, lizard hunting is another day!’

‘Where’s the maths! Where’s the maths!’ they start again, and my head is aching and my face is hot and sweaty. The hill is very steep. I think if I stand still and look up towards the sky and the priory I might topple backwards, there is such a gradient. The path winds back and forth on itself. As we round a bend, a tall, silver pole rears up in front of us, set in a grassy niche. At the top is a finely wrought image of our Lord Jesus being condemned to death by the wicked Pontius Pilate.

‘Number one!’ yells Almodis and then starts running ‘Where’s number two?’ and they all start running to catch up with her.

I give up, I think to myself, exhausted already. I will get to the top in my own time. Another bench is placed opposite the silver pole and I sit myself down to catch my breath. The blasphemy of it! We should be meditating on our Lord’s suffering on the Via Crucis, not doing maths! I’ve only been sitting, puffing, for a moment when Guillaume comes scambling back down the path and starts heaving on my arm.

‘Come on Bernadette. Mother says you are to keep up and you need to do maths.’

The cheek of it, but I know she’ll only be embarrassing me in front of the children if I don’t comply so I get to my feet and trudge up behind the boy, to join them all gathered around ‘number two’, the second silver pole with a rectangular silver plaque at the top embossed with an image of Our Lord being given his cross, his knees bending at the awful weight of it, and his poor head dripping with blood from his crown of thorns.

‘So the Roman governor of Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, ordered that he carry his own cross up a hill as steep as this,’ Almodis finishes telling the children. ‘So what do you think might happen in number three? Help Bernadette, Jourdain!’ and off they all go again, with Jourdain pushing me from behind while I hold
Raymond
tight in both arms, alarmed now at the precipice to my left and the craggy unevenness of the path. This is no place to be
carrying
the baby of a count. What is she thinking? And no place to be tripping around laughing with four other children either. The sun beats hot on my shoulders and back. At number three I croak ‘I need water!’ and Almodis hands around the water skin that she is carrying slung over her shoulder and we all take a sip.

Number three shows the Lord Jesus falling for the first time under his terrible burden, and I feel just like him myself, no chance to catch my breath before we are off again to number four where we see Jesus’ poor mother Mary, meeting him on his way to his terrible death, and weeping. I am struggling to keep up with them and can barely glance at the next stations of the cross: Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross, Veronica wiping the face of Jesus, Jesus falling the second time, Jesus meeting the daughters of Jerusalem, Jesus falling the third time, Jesus stripped of his
garments
and then the crucifixion: Jesus nailed to the cross. I should be doing this walk very slowly, meditating on every one. Oh I am so tired, I hardly see the last three: Jesus dying on the cross, Jesus’ body removed from the cross and Jesus laid in the tomb and covered in incense.

Finally, my thighs aching terrible, the sweat trickling down my back, my arms trembling, we have passed all the silver stations of the cross and at the top there is a small cemetery and a little church where I can sit down in the cool shade. Eventually the pounding of my heart and at my temples starts to slow down. Almodis sits next to me breast-feeding Raymond (which is a scandal of course to do so in a church).

‘What would you have me do, Bernadette? Boil the poor baby’s head in this heat?’ she responds, when I tutch at her.

You should stay at home in the cool calm of your chambers like a proper woman and mother I think instead of dragging us all up dangerous hills. Still there was no one in the church to
see her, well only the statue of Madonna, with her own baby Jesus on her breast, I realise. So I relent. Perhaps she is in the right of it and Mary wouldn’t mind a bit of baby-feeding in her church. Raymond climbs off her lap and rejoins his brothers and sister.

The children, having explored around the church in a small troop, are starting to get bored. ‘Sit here,’ for a moment,’ their mother tells them and they obey. They always do obey her, and never me, when her back is turned. Five children all under six is a lot for me to handle and she should get a nursemaid for the job, but she won’t. ‘I want you to look out for them, Bernadette. You will be fair to all of them, including Hugh and Jourdain and Melisende, but a nursemaid here would favour my Toulouse
children
over my Lusignans, and I won’t have that.’ So here I am, lumbered with two huge jobs, looking after her (that’s the biggest!) and looking after five young children.

‘So how many stations of the cross did we see altogether?’ she asks them. ‘Fourteen!’ Hugh answers quick as a snap.

‘Yes,’ she smiles at him. ‘If there were two of every silver pole we saw instead of one, how many poles would that be?’ There was a silent pause at that. Much too hard, I am beginning to think. I don’t know the answer to that, how could …

‘Twenty-eight,’ says Jourdain.

‘Yes! And what if there were three of every pole?’ and so she goes on, with them calling out their answers. ‘And what if half the poles were blown down by the wind, how many would there be?’

I cross myself at that. Surely that is blasphemy and we are sitting in the Lord’s very house. Eventually they tire of their maths.

‘Is this our land, Mother?” asks Guillaume, which seems to be one of his favourite questions, wherever we are.

‘Yes. This is the chateau, the domain and the village of
Ambialet
, which belongs to me. Your father,’ she says, ‘gave it to me as part of his wedding gift, and I shall give it to Raymond when he is a man.’ Raymond opens his eyes wide at that and points at his chest. She nods at him. ‘Yes, the lands that were my wedding portion, will be yours one day and you must rule them well.’

‘You could put in some more benches for tired nursemaids, for a start,’ I grumble and they all laugh at me.

‘Time to go home,’ Almodis declares, ‘but we will pass by the chateau for you to see it Raymond and we can swim in the river when we get to the bottom of the hill to cool down.’ They are all jumping up and down with joy at that. Swim in the river indeed! She’s taught them all how to swim, ignoring my warnings, and saying that Charlemagne and Beowulf were great swimmers. We’re not fish, I say.

‘Be careful, going down,’ I shout at their backs disappearing around the bend. ‘It’s more dangerous going down …’ but they are already long gone and she with them.

When we arrive at the riverbank there is a fête in preparation and the castellan of Ambialet invites us to stay overnight for the event. My Lady agrees and we watch entranced as young people in boats row on quiet oars up the river with lanterns and arrange themselves on the dark waters in the patterns of stars.

Later, in the castle, when the children have all gone to sleep, curled up on palettes near the fire with the castellan’s own
children
, a troubadour comes to entertain my Lady with a story of Count Geoffrey of Anjou’s recent victory over the Count of Blois at the battle of Nouy. The French King Henri had given the city of Tours to Geoffrey, the troubadour tells us, and Geoffrey had besieged the city for more than a year, trying to claim his
property
. The Count of Blois and his brother came with seventeen hundred armed men to aid the starving city. Geoffrey prayed to Saint Martin for his aid and a miracle occurred. The whole mass of Geoffrey’s army, on horse and on foot, seemed to be clad in shining white robes and the Count of Blois’ troops were unable to fight, feeling as though they were bound in chains, and the saintly Geoffrey won the battle. My Lady and I exchange glances at that. If Geoffrey was saintly he’d changed a bit for sure! More like he promised to give the saint back everything he’d stolen from him and got saintly intervention that way. I look down at my feet. It must be near bedtime and I am looking forward to taking my boots off.

She’s had five babies in three years: the twins, then Melisende,
then Guillaume born ten months after Melisende and Raymond born nine months after Guillaume. Some women would have had their health sapped by such childbearing, but my mistress is thriving and happy enough when Pons is not in the vicinity. When the cat’s away the mice will play. ‘You are my war-band, my
drut
: Dia, Bernadette and Rostagnus,’ she tells us, ‘my band of faithful friends,’ and indeed, we are at war.

‘Read this out, Dia.’ She passes a long scroll that she has been working on all morning, getting her fingers inky, whilst we laboured at the proper work of ladies, stitching hems and hose.

‘One: monsters, cripples and sickly children are conceived on holy nights,’ reads Dia, and looks up. ‘What is this, Almodis?’

‘Read on.’

‘Two: a husband must not seek the marriage debt the night before holy days.’

‘That’s Tuesdays and Thursdays,’ Almodis says.

‘Three: a man must abjure carnal relations with his wife forty days before Easter, before Holy Cross Day in September and during Lent,’ continues Dia. ‘Four: menstruating women do give men leprosy. Five: marriage is ordained by God, not for the sake of lust but rather for the sake of offspring. A man should abstain from sex with his pregnant wife.’ Dia is laughing now, as she
continues
the list. ‘He must abstain for three months before
childbirth
and forty days after childbirth. Six: the Church ordains that a husband must not have sex during the day.’

‘Do you like them?’ Almodis asks. ‘They are my catechism of excuses. I am collecting them in everything I read!’ Dia laughs, but it is no laughing matter. She sins if she denies her husband his marriage-debt. ‘Yet,’ she says, suddenly reflective, ‘loathing does not hurt as bad as tenderness.’