Crusade (17 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Georgette woke some unknown time later because someone was lifting her away from Robert. With the little strength left in her arms, she held on to Robert, muttering, ‘No, no, have to keep him warm.’

‘It will be better for him and for you if you will loose your hold, young one, and let me put you both into my cart,’ a man’s voice said, and she waked enough to see a dark shape leaning over her, silhouetted against a cold dawn sky. The Lord had heard her prayers. ‘Truly, Jesus is great,’ she whispered, but the man did not reply with an ‘Amen’.

He had turned his attention to Robert, dragging him with difficulty to a rough cart stopped right behind them on the track. The steam from the man’s heavy breathing mingled with that from an extraordinarily ugly horse chomping at the bit. The man would not be able to lift Robert into the cart, Georgette thought, her body aching to sink back into sleep. She must get up and help. Muttering some strange words that she couldn’t make out, the man desperately heaved Robert halfway up the side of the cart, and she caught up with him just in time to help raise the burden, so that the body went over the wooden ledge and dropped down on to some empty sacks and a little straw.

‘Good girl,’ the man said, leaning his back against the cart with a soft groan. ‘Now you climb up there too and I’ll take you both home to my wife. She will know what to do.’

The horse’s gait was as awkward as his looks. As he stumbled along, Georgette slid from side to side with every lurch. Robert’s body was limp and his eyes closed. She tried to hold him still against the jolting, but he knocked against the side of the cart again and again without any sign of consciousness. And again and again, Georgette prayed that the body she was trying to hold still was not lifeless.

The man knew Robert was past hearing and he must have thought the girl had long been asleep, for he did not lower his voice as he talked with his wife before the fire in their simple farmhouse.

‘Crusaders! In our home,’ the woman said.

‘They’re not Crusaders, they’re only children,’ he protested.

‘What kind of parents allow their children to march off at this age, Samuel? If we had had a child
 . . .
’ Her voice cracked.

‘The kind of parents who believe what the priests tell them,’ was his reply.

Georgette was lying on a straw pallet close to Robert’s still form, drowsy and warm but keeping herself awake to watch the precious sight of Robert’s chest moving slightly, rhythmically. Each breath carried a message.
I am alive. I did not die out there in the snow. I am still with you.

When she realised what the man and woman were saying, she almost spoke up.
It was my choice. My father and Father David did not want me to go, but they couldn’t stop me.
But her fatigue, combined with her desire not to contradict the hosts who had saved their lives, overwhelmed her impulse.

The wife spoke again. ‘And the danger to us? To the whole village? That boy is so weak. If anything happens to them here, you know we’ll be blamed.’

The man shrugged helplessly. ‘What else was there for me to do, Hannah? Leave them to die in the snow?’

In the silence that followed, Georgette fell asleep and never found out why the woman thought they would be blamed if Robert died.

They stayed with their benefactors, who introduced themselves as Mollin and Anita, for five days. For the first two, Robert was too weak to talk; almost too weak to sip the sweetened warm milk the woman gave Georgette to slip between his lips. On the third day, he was able to rise from his straw pallet and walk, with support, to sit on a bench before the fire and murmur his thanks for every attention. On the fourth, he proclaimed he was well enough to take a walk outdoors, but his hosts said it was too snowy that day and he had better stay in the house. Georgette too was dissuaded from helping with outdoor farm chores ‘to avoid becoming cold and falling ill with whatever had ailed the young man’. So she built up her strength in the warm hut, caring for Robert and doing what she could to assist her hosts indoors by way of cooking and cleaning and spinning. She had never stayed in a hut with a chimney before and she loved watching the smoke from the hearth spiral up into a dark hole and disappear like magic.

On the fifth day, Robert announced that he would be strong enough to depart with Georgette the following morning.

The man looked at him doubtfully. ‘Perhaps one more day of rest, to be sure?’

But Robert and Georgette were in accord, as always. Those who waited for them had waited too long. They must relieve that anxiety by reaching home as soon as possible. And they longed for home more passionately as they drew closer and closer. Perhaps two weeks of travel remained, depending on their pace. Only two weeks, after all the terrible months.

That was the day the woman suspended her largest iron pot from the pot hanger in the fireplace and heated water in it. She hung a blanket from the ceiling in one corner of the hut and then helped the man to carry inside a huge cauldron that they placed behind the blanket, creating a private area. Robert and Georgette watched with interest as the man carried behind the curtain first several buckets of hot water and then a bucket or two of cold water from the well.

‘Come, young Robert,’ the man said. ‘I will help you to bathe.’

Robert disappeared behind the curtain and Georgette heard plenty of splashing. When he emerged, he was pink and shiny, wound in a blanket that had been warming near the fire. Then the woman took Georgette behind the curtain. Robert marvelled at the sheen in her loose, flowing hair when she too was escorted back to the hearth, dressed in her own shift that had been scrubbed and stiffened with flour-water the previous day. It was the first time each of them had ever washed their entire body at one time, other than by swimming in a river, and they felt wonderfully fresh.

Their hosts carried the cauldron outside and apparently took their own baths, for they fairly gleamed when they returned, the man in a long white tunic and the woman in an embroidered white shift.

‘We shall have a special dinner tonight. Your last night with us,’ announced the woman, spreading a clean piece of linen over the trestle table and bringing out not one but two candles. The wine was sweet and served in a single silver-coloured goblet that they passed from hand to hand. The man and woman’s lips moved before they drank their share, and Georgette wondered if they were making a secret wish perhaps. For herself, she wished that apple cider had been served rather than wine: the pullet the woman had roasted was so salty that she had to drink mug after mug to quench her thirst.

After dinner, the man turned to Robert.

‘Is it possible you know the game of chess, young Robert?’

Smiling, Robert answered in the affirmative. ‘Some years ago, there was a nobleman forced to stay at my abbey for a few weeks because of a broken leg. He was most impatient at the inactivity and for his amusement he taught me the rules of chess and we played every day. But I have not had any partner since, and I forget the rules.’

As excited as a boy who has found another boy to play ball with, the man dismissed Robert’s diffidence and brought out a board and ornate wooden pieces he had carved himself. They played for a long time, the man advising Robert during the first few games before settling into serious play.

Her head heavy from too much wine, Georgette lay down on her pallet as soon as she had finished helping to clear the table after dinner. Within minutes, she was asleep. Robert glanced back to smile at her snoring and caught sight of the woman, who was standing at a small window on the far side of the room with a scarf of lacework draped over her hair, reciting a prayer of some kind with her eyes closed. How strange, Robert thought, that she prays standing rather than kneeling, and does not uncover her hair.

At that moment, the woman opened her eyes and saw Robert observing her.

‘Would you, would you care for some more wine, young Robert?’ she asked hastily.

When Robert demurred, she muttered a goodnight and disappeared behind the curtain, hiding the marital bed.

Robert’s subsequent distraction lost him that game. To his host’s disappointment, he declined an invitation to play again, claiming weariness. Soon the house was quiet and dark.

In the morning Georgette woke a little late. Their hosts were not in the house, perhaps out feeding their animals. Robert was lying still on his mattress, staring blankly, lost in thought. She knew him so well; something was troubling him.

Georgette rose quietly and sat down cross-legged beside him, pulling her blanket around her for warmth. He was looking up at the ceiling of the little farmhouse, his hands linked behind his head.

‘What is it, Robert?’ she whispered.

When he finally replied, he didn’t look at her. It was as if he was talking to himself. ‘They’re Jews.’

Georgette started. These kind people were of the same creed as the hordes that shouted sweet Jesus to his death? She winced as she remembered Gregor’s description of beating Jews the night before he grew ill. He said they had put a curse upon him and indeed he never recovered. But maybe it was cruelly beating a man, a man who looked not too different from their father, which had haunted him. It was the first time he had measured the man behind the Jew, and this was her first time. The measurements didn’t fit.

They left after a breakfast of bread and cheese in front of an unlit hearth. Their hosts led them directly from the door into the woods, guiding them along what they said was a quick path through the forest to the market road, where passing farmers might offer them a ride. Robert and Georgette followed obediently; it seemed clear that their hosts did not want them to see any of the other people in the village, or perhaps they did not want their neighbours to see their young guests.

‘You saved my life. I will always be deeply grateful,’ Robert said when they reached the market road. He looked into the man’s eyes and then those of the woman, and grasped their hands in turn. ‘May God bless you.’

The woman smiled and turned to Georgette, who blushed and stammered. Looking down, she murmured her thanks again and again, until the woman stopped her with a brief touch on the arm.

There was an awkward silence.

‘Off you go, then,’ the man said. ‘May God be with you too.’

As they turned away, he lifted his hand and Georgette had a wild fear that the heretic was casting a spell on them. But glancing behind her, she saw he was simply waving, and she waved back. Then the two couples turned their backs and walked in opposite directions.

Chapter Nineteen

As Robert and Georgette drew closer to her village, she became almost giddy with longing for home, for the sweet scent of a new straw roof, for the sights and sounds of the whole village working together to bring in the wheat harvest. If Bess had not been slaughtered in the fall, would the fat old sow recognise her? She dared not wonder about the health of her father and beloved Father David. She had been away for a year, but she wanted desperately for everything to be unchanged. Yet without Gregor, how could things ever be the same?

When they were about a mile away, she led Robert off the main track and along the borders between the small fields, taking care not to trespass on the fallow earth as it emerged from winter’s blanket. They zigzagged in a roundabout way until they had circled the village at a distance and arrived at the back of the little hamlet.