Crusade (20 page)

‘I can barely believe what you told me yesterday, boy. Word of your ridiculous marriage, your break from the path I set for you, will make me a laughing stock for those who watched me educate and guide you. You cannot do this to me. I demand that you swear before God, right now, that you will have this village wedding annulled, which it is in my power to arrange, and to join the Church in a suitable position, which it is also within my power to arrange.’

Robert stared at him. ‘My wife is my life, Père Abbé. Without her, I would have died, first in my soul and later in my body.’

‘Bah, sentimental nonsense, boy,’ the abbot roared, rising and looming over Robert. ‘I am the one to whom you owe this life of yours. I picked you from the gutter. I saved you from an early grave. You were dust and I gave you form.’

Then Robert too was on his feet, his face flushed and his eyes flashing. ‘You were my saviour indeed, my teacher and my guide, and I will never forget the enormous debt I owe you. And perhaps some day I will pass on your great favours to an unfortunate youth in need. But when he is grown, I will not, I could not, tell him what he is to be. That he must learn for himself.’

‘Do not dare to talk back to me, boy. If you do not obey me, I will cut you off for ever.’

There! The threat was spoken. There was silence, broken only by the quick angry breaths of both men.

Robert spoke quietly, ‘When I told you, Père Abbé, that God had it in His mind that I join the Children’s Crusade, I was right, but not in the way I understood at the time. That terrible journey, which affected me more deeply than you permitted me to share with you last night, was my first glimpse of a long and winding path God intends me to take.

‘And without detracting from my gratitude to you, Père Abbé, I follow the path of God.’ Robert bent, took up his cape from the bench, wished the abbot God’s blessings, and left.

The two had not met since. Georgette did not lament the loss of a powerful sponsor, but she was sad for Robert, who had not been welcomed home as she had. She knew he missed the abbot’s protection, his guidance and experience.

‘Brooding old blackbird. His brain got so big that he sacrificed his heart to make space for it. But he cannot get between my husband and me. We share two hearts that beat as one,’ Georgette muttered. ‘I will not darken this beautiful day with thoughts of the abbot.’

Her basket held fish, a small loaf of bread, a little cheese, two sprigs of tansy for their straw mattress to discourage fleas, and, balancing carefully on the top, a treat: raspberries almost as fat as the ones she used to gather from wild canes at home. Robert loved raspberries, and she had bargained well for them.

On her way home, after she crossed the bridge to the Île de la Cité and turned into the narrow alley where she and Robert lived, Georgette remembered to cross the road before passing a certain tall house. The neighbour who rented the top floor had a habit of dropping her slops from the upstairs window without a shout of warning.

Once she reached her own tiny home on the upper floor of a narrow timber house, she placed her purchases on the rough table and began to put the room to rights. Humming, she punched the straw mattress, shook the bed quilt, dusted fluffy ends of wool from her spindle and distaff, swept the floor, spread fresh straw, and scrubbed the table. She arranged the plump and fuzzy raspberries on a perfect, glowing-green oak leaf she had picked on her way from the market – God’s beauty.

Taking the chamber pot from under the bed, Georgette called a warning out of the window and waited an exaggerated time for any reply before emptying out the contents. She winced as the sewage joined the putrid rivulet below, and a pig waddled closer to sample the swill. On hot days, children splashed in the foul stream. She and her father had shaken their heads about this aspect of Paris. In the village, they recalled together, people threw their waste into a deep pit, and dug another when that one was full. When charcoal was scattered in regularly, the pit hardly smelled at all.

During the far too short but blessed three months that her father had lived with them before he fell ill and died, father and daughter had walked the streets, like the country folk they were, gawking at the tall buildings, pointing out the fine carriages, wondering at the luxurious goods for sale.

Their favourite stroll took them to a viewing place on the bank of the Seine. On the opposite side, hundreds of workers swarmed around a massive half-completed stone structure with a strangely beautiful shape. The outer walls shot true up to the sky, then curved gracefully towards each other and kissed at the sharp point at the top. It was a palace of a cathedral, a soaring, sacred building, called Notre Dame.

Tears came to Georgette’s eyes at the memory. ‘We were happy together, Father, weren’t we?’ she whispered.

Once she had cleaned the room, Georgette spent two quiet hours at her spinning. Then it was time to heat Robert’s pottage over the little stove. To save the money it would cost him to eat the midday meal in an alehouse, as many of the other students did, she always took his food to him, wrapping the warm bowl in linen cloths.

‘Tell me about your morning classes, Robert,’ she said, as they sat in a sunny corner of the great courtyard just inside the university walls and dipped their horn spoons into the same bowl.

‘There was a debate about the order that Brother Francis started,’ he said, and her eyes lit up. The experience they had shared the previous year, the journey that had made them everything to each other, had at the same time made them different from everyone else, it seemed. Their faith had been burned in a fire, beaten on an anvil, and emerged changed. Even at the university, where a new discipline, the formal study of theology, was taking shape, Robert had found no scholar who shared the exact timbre of his beliefs. Only the teachings of Brother Francis of Assisi came anywhere close.

‘Our teacher said that the Pope was right to tonsure Brother Francis and his disciples against their will, for a monk’s shaven head is a sign of submission to the Church.’

‘Did they explain why Brother Francis objected
 . . .
?’

But as Georgette began her question, they were both distracted by a little knot of students who had gathered around a stranger quite near them. He looked foreign, not only because of his unfamiliar cassock but for his dark complexion and strange accent. His voice was clear and it had carried to them a fragment that drew them to their feet and closer to his story.

‘Child slaves, French child slaves, I tell you.’

‘And you stood by as this happened?’ demanded one student.

Pain crossed the stranger’s face like a shadow, and his voice cracked as he defended himself.

‘I tried, indeed I did. When I heard the children utter some words in French, I went closer and asked them how they had come to such a sad plight. They said they were pilgrims on their way from Marseilles to the Holy Land. But they were captured by pirates and sold as slaves instead.

‘I begged the slave owners to release them to my custody. I said they were children of my faith and promised to reimburse them if they would give me a little time to raise the money from my community. They laughed at me and said I could never come up with enough money.

‘ “These are not just ordinary slaves,
”
’ they boasted to me. ‘ “It is rare to find a group of such attractive child slaves, European children.
”
’ It was clear that they expected to make a fortune from the sale.

‘When I persisted and threatened to seek the intervention of a certain Christian courtier in the employ of the sultan, they set upon me. They hit me over the head and dumped me, unconscious, beyond the city walls. By the time I came to, and ran to my superiors for help, the children had been sold and their captors had disappeared.’

Robert’s voice broke harshly into the group’s exclamations of disgust.

‘How long ago did you see these child slaves and where?’

‘’Twas but a few months ago, in my home country of Egypt, in the port of Alexandria, where slave auctions are held perhaps two times in each week.’

‘How many were there?’

‘Some hundreds, I would calculate. They said they were more at the start, enough to fill seven ships, but two ships were lost in a storm. The remaining five ships were met by pirates, ruffians who, strangely, seemed familiar to the crew. The children were chained to one another and transferred on to boats bound for the slave market.’

The students in the group were staring at Robert, who was usually silent and aloof, as he snapped his terse questions. Turning away abruptly, he drew Georgette quickly out of the courtyard and to a quiet corner so they could be alone.

The young couple never spoke about the Children’s Crusade. They would have shrunk from exposing to anyone else the cataclysm of that journey. And they felt no need to talk to each other about an experience they shared so intimately. Now, suddenly, the tragic conclusion of the Children’s Crusade felt raw and terrible again.

‘Patrice,’ Georgette whispered. ‘And the others. Tied up like animals, in a faraway land.’ Wild, independent Patrice. Or maybe she was dead at the bottom of the sea, pale young flesh nibbled by creatures of the deep. Georgette sobbed as she had sobbed only for the death of her brother and that of Father David. Robert held her tightly.

Chapter Twenty-Three

One evening, not long after the encounter with the stranger, there was a firm knock on their door. The couple glanced at each other; they knew no one who would visit at this hour.

Making his voice stern, Robert called out through the locked door, ‘Who goes there?’

‘My name is Brother Thomas. I was a friend of Father David of Illiers many years ago.’

Robert turned to Georgette but she was already at the door, her fingers clumsy in their haste to open the bolt.

An old man dressed in the same humble black habit Father David had worn and the same rough wooden shoes was standing on the threshold with a tentative smile on his face. There was an openness and simplicity in his expression she had not seen since she left Father David for the Crusade.

‘Please enter, Brother Thomas,’ she said, drawing him inside. ‘I am Georgette and this is my husband, Robert.’ Robert offered their guest a seat close to the fire and handed him the mug of hot cider, which he had not yet had a chance to drink.

‘How in the name of the Lord did you find out that I was a friend of Father David?’ Georgette asked, her voice breaking over the dear name.

Brother Thomas stretched out his feet to the fire and murmured his thanks for the warming drink. ‘I had not been near Father David’s adopted village for many years, ever since we parted as young men, so when I found myself in the district I walked a good distance to visit my old friend. It was a great sadness to me that he had died in the meantime.’

Georgette bowed her head.

‘When I asked about his books, I was told that he had left them to a young girl he had helped to raise, and that the girl had married a man called Robert, who was studying at the University of Paris. That was some months ago. It happened that my work brought me to Paris this morning. I asked some questions of the students at the university, and this evening I followed my man home. Please forgive me for not approaching you directly, young Robert, but my business is with your wife and I thought it best to speak to her directly.’

Robert nodded and Georgette asked, ‘What is your errand, good brother?’

‘Father David owned some copies of the Gospel translated into vernacular French,’ he replied. ‘These copies are very useful for
 . . .
a certain purpose of which he approved. I hope to presume upon your generosity in requesting that you allow me to take the books with me on my travels.’

Robert and Georgette stared at him. Those two books were copied simply without decoration, but they were nevertheless valuable. It was an extraordinary request from a stranger.

‘I think we can talk about that business after dinner,’ Georgette prevaricated. ‘If you only arrived in Paris this morning and have been trailing my husband since then, you cannot have eaten. And following a man secretly is very tiring, I would imagine.’

Brother Thomas flushed, but she smiled back to show him she bore him no malice. Meekly he accepted her invitation to join them at the little trestle table for hot pottage and Georgette’s excellent honey mead.