The Lute Player (17 page)

‘You mean they admitted—Richard, surely you must be mistaken. Alys was almost a baby when she came here. He’s always regarded her as a daughter, like Joanna. I find it difficult to believe even now. Look, Richard, are you quite sure? You have never much wanted to marry Alys; if you had you would have done so years ago. Now Philip has tried to force your hand. Are you sure that you are not seeking an excuse and finding one because you looked so hard?’

‘I want Philip’s allegiance. For the crusade. Should I jeopardise that because of what I imagined? You, Mother, shrink from believing this because it is too shameful. If you could have heard them, she squalling like a scalded cat and he raving… And now at last I have a grudge against him that will bring all Christendom to my side. Even that pious half monk, Philip, who thinks it such a
pity
that a son should raise hand against his father—though he hates Henry as the devil hates holy water—will see the justice of my cause.’

‘If he believes it, which he won’t. Richard, I know Henry—he’s faithless, he’s lecherous. I hold no brief for him at all but even I have the greatest difficulty in believing that a combination of circumstances and your state of mind haven’t led you to a mistaken conclusion.’

‘There’s no mistake. If you could have seen and heard them. Not that I grudge him the white-faced, yellow-headed little whore. He’s welcome to her—as I told him. What angers me is that he should plan that I should marry his leavings. It’s all of a piece with his behaviour. Anybody’d think he was God Almighty. Always the same. Henry, Geoffrey and me. Duke of this, Duke of that—fuel for his vanity, titles and nonsense, none of it real. Always one of his long-nosed Normans hanging on our elbows, telling us when to go to bed, when to change our linen… All false! And this is the ultimate falsity. He counts his sons so little that he thinks he can take first cut at my joint and that I shall not mind. Well, at least I gave him to understand that I do not take his leavings—even though it costs me Philip’s friendship. And between him and me there will be war henceforth until one of us is dead. The world shall know why. All Christendom shall know what a lecherous old—Henry the Lawgiver—Lawgiver, forsooth—is.’

With that I pulled my muddled, shattered mind together and began to think quickly.

I still found it incredible that Henry and Alys should be lovers and not a whisper of the fact have stolen out. But Richard was prepared to believe it, did believe it, and was about to shout the dreadful news to the whole world.

For myself I minded little if at all. There had been Huldah and Edith and Rosamonde… Men whispered that I had poisoned all three but they were whispers, not shouted accusations. And it was one thing for a king to take a mistress, quite another for him to debauch a young girl, his ward, committed to his care as the betrothed of his son. That fact, bruited abroad by the son himself, would have results horrible to contemplate.

There had been a time when, if I saw something more clearly or more quickly than other people, I let fly straight at the bull’s-eye of the argument, rapping out my reasons. That way I had gained the hatred of two husbands, reduced one son to spineless subjugation. Now I was wary and cunning.

‘It is a horrible story,’ I said. ‘And if you proclaim it, Richard, everyone in the world will think your quarrel a just one. And how they will laugh!’

‘Laugh? By God’s toenails! Why should anybody laugh?’

‘Because everybody dreads old age, Richard; therefore, anything that diminishes the value of youth is pleasing to them. Have you never noticed how, if an older man unseats a younger in the lists, men laugh? I have. And the prospect of a father cuckolding his son—for that is what it amounts to—will make them laugh till their ribs crack.’

He stood stock-still and glared at me; then he said sullenly, ‘That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘You’ve had little time for thinking,’ I said.

He brooded for a second or two and then burst out with renewed savagery: ‘But I
wanted
a good excuse against him. He’s played the injured father often enough. “A nest of rebellious vipers”—that’s what they say of us. “Honour thy father,” they prate. And,’ he added, turning on his heel and slapping the gloves again, ‘I’ve Philip to think of. I never was sure of that unclipped monk’s allegiance, even when I was going to marry his sister! Now I’m in worse case. If I don’t marry her and don’t give the rightful reason, the shifting poltroon will be making terms with Henry within a week.’

I spoke slowly, gently, adding word to word as though the thought I uttered had just occurred to me; concealing from Richard the fact that my mind had run ahead of his, for that is a thing, I had learned, that men abhor.

‘I think you should tell Philip. And, if you pretended that you concealed the truth from the rest of the world out of chivalry, that would be an excellent thing. That would appeal to Philip. But for the rest, for many reasons, I would leave them guessing. For one thing the sight of two princes, father and son, squabbling over a girl’s body is not a very edifying spectacle.’

I could have said much more but I waited.

‘
He
said that,’ Richard muttered. ‘He offered me the satisfaction of meeting him in single combat. I told him I wanted a fuller revenge than the making of a hole in his great carcase would afford me. He also offered—if I kept silence—to withdraw all supervision from my duchy. I told him that any man of his who showed his face in Aquitaine after this would withdraw without waiting for
his
order. I meant to expose him, shame him before the world. And now—if I must hush up the story…’ His face darkened ominously.

‘There’s no
must
,’ I hastened to say. ‘But there is another reason for keeping silence. Will you be offended if I explain it to you?’

‘When you offend me, Mother, I’ll tell you. I’m not Harry, you know.’

‘Poor Harry, God rest him,’ I said, and spared a thought for my eldest son who, entirely intractable towards everyone but me, had been pliable as thread in my hands. But Harry was dead and this angry man before me was the heir to England—it was to him I must speak.

‘These English of yours, Richard, are a peculiar people. Coarse, ignorant, bloodthirsty but very
moral
. And this country is English now, not Norman any more. William conquered England but he did not vanquish the English people; a few retained their manors; many women married Normans and imposed their peculiar standards upon their children. They’re sly and they love to cloak a practical expediency with a well-sounding idealism. I realised that long ago and knew that if half Henry’s misdoings were noised abroad there were many men who would rise up and say, ‘Shall this fornicator rule us?’ And they’d really believe that it was the fornication and the adultery that they hated and not his Angevin blood and his reforms of law. And the English are very susceptible to the rule of women; look how they rallied to Matilda; look how they still sentimentalise about ‘Good Queen Maud.’ Any time in these last twenty years, Richard, I could have raised a queen’s party in this country and had all the best men in England on my side, joined by every little tyrant whose castle Henry has dismantled and every noble whose authority he has undermined.’

‘And I wonder you haven’t,’ Richard said. ‘By the Rood, in your place I would.’

‘And to what end?’ I asked. ‘To what end? To set all England in a ferment of a Saxon revival? To make smooth the way for the kin of the Atheling? No, I wanted England for my son. Once—before I acquired wisdom—I tried to take it by force. I misjudged the time. I thought that Harry and I—But that is old history and I have paid the price of my mistake. Sixteen years, Richard, I have been confined here and I shall stay here until I die or he does. And I have learned wisdom. We must wait now and let him rule England,
whole and entire
, until he dies; and you must survive him and you must get you an heir. You can rise against him in Aquitaine, where men are sensible, if rise you must; but do not speak the word which might make your moral English say, ‘
All
these Angevins are evil men!’ Leave England intact, for this small island is the brightest jewel in your crown. Aquitaine, dear to my heart, Gascony, Brittany, Normandy are great and glorious; but they are vulnerable, always dependent upon the good will or the weakness of their neighbours. England is, or could be, an impregnable fortress that could defy the world.’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘In Harold’s place I could have held it. Harold was a good fighter but a poor strategist who fought the wildcat while the tiger mustered for the spring!’ He stood still for a moment, running through his mind the battles of Stamford Bridge and Senlac Field as
he
would have fought them. Battles, the muster and disposition of men and weapons were to him a mental playground.

I moved quietly back to the table and into one of the coarse horn beakers which had long since replaced the silver on my table I poured a measure of the bitter English ale with which it pleased Nicolas of Saxham to serve me instead of the wine I loved.

‘This is quite horrible,’ I said, ‘but I can say from experience that it is harmless and even sustaining.’

He took the beaker and drained it, set it back on the table and then walked beyond and seated himself on the seat below the window.

‘You argue just like a woman, Mother,’ Richard said. ‘With one breath, you tell me that if men knew about my father and my betrothed—damn them both to hell—they’d laugh till their ribs cracked and with the next you predict that the same news would lead to bloody rebellion. Now you can’t make that team pull in the same yoke.’

I had been accused of almost everything in my time but never before of lack of logic.

‘You say that because you don’t know your English, Richard. The very ones who laughed at you, the cuckold, would be the first to rise against him, the lecher. And you must admit that between the two there’d be very little royal Angevin dignity left.’

‘Nimble little tongue,’ Richard said with sudden good humour. ‘No wonder he keeps you locked up!’

‘I keep myself locked up,’ I said proudly. ‘When Harry and I rose against him I could have gone to Aquitaine and bleated out the true story of Rosamonde Clifford, justified myself, and ruled there. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted England—all of it. And I didn’t want it for John; remember that. Harry first, then you. You are my sons. Were; are. Harry was; you are. John is Henry’s man.’

Richard was silent for a moment, then he said:

‘Well, you have muddled the argument but you have convinced me. I’ll tell Philip and nobody else. Then I’ll make an excuse to fight Henry and this time I’ll fight him to the end. I’ll begin by attacking Le Mans which he regards as another Bethlehem because, forsooth, he was born there.’

‘And for Christ’s own sake, be careful when you fight,’ I said. ‘I live in dread lest anything should happen to you.’ Everything, every conflicting expression went out of his face, leaving a great clear shining.

‘Nothing can happen to me,’ he said, ‘until I have taken Jerusalem. Begin to worry about me when my colours fly over the Holy Sepulchre. Then I may tread on a rusty nail or swallow a fishbone; and die, the happiest man on earth! Until then nothing can touch me. I’ve proved that. I’ve taken special risks to prove it. Mother, you must come on crusade with me. The Lady of the Golden Boot must ride again! We’ll ride into Jerusalem side by side and feast where Solomon’s great palace stood. And then you shall repeat your exhortations—and I will listen. For when I have taken Jerusalem I shall be vulnerable like other men.’

‘Richard,’ I said, forgetting my role and speaking motherly, ‘that is wild talk. And dangerous. You are vulnerable
now
. You have great strength and great skill—but you are flesh and blood, prey to sword or axe or arrow. What you have just said sounds—so reckless. And it smacks of witchcraft too.’

‘And isn’t that natural enough?’ he asked with a teasing laugh. ‘Aren’t we all, according to legend, descendants of the devil?’

‘Hush,’ I said. A little shudder ran, down my backbone. This was not the moment to remember the woman who was great-grandmother to
my
brood. The woman who went to Mass so seldom and then was always careful to leave before the consecration and whose husband finally ordered four strong men to hold her down at the moment when the Host was lifted. They said that the four men were left with the cloak of the countess in their hands. She had vanished and there was the scent of burning brimstone in the church.

‘Richard,’ I said firmly, ‘who is talking like a woman now? We are settling policies and campaigns. Let’s leave the chatter of broomsticks and magic to the old women huddled over the fire on winter nights. I have thought of something useful. If you do decide to fight your father there is that which he regards more highly than the town of Le Mans—the loss of which would deal him a shrewder blow.’

‘He loves that town beyond all.’

‘No, he holds one thing more precious.’

‘And that is? Mother, tell me. It shall be my first target.’

‘Your brother John,’ I said. ‘John is the heart of his heart. If you could persuade John to join you…’

I felt, even as I spoke, that I was suggesting the impossible. John was Henry’s man. I myself regarded John as a hen might regard a duckling which she had hatched or as a briar might some graftling. Out of my flesh he sprang, of my blood he was born but he was no child of mine. He had lain at my breast in his suckling days, a dark-skinned, dark-eyed baby, inclined even then to fattishness, the stranger. Henry, Geoffrey, Richard, even my gentle daughter Joanna, had courage from the start; they thought nothing of a nipped finger, a broken knee. John was a born coward. My children had no conscious charm; they did what they willed. If it was wrong, they were in disgrace; if it was good, they were in favour—but they never tried to please.

John had great charm, deliberately exercised. All through his youth he behaved as though he were a peasant child suddenly transported and, conscious of his inferiority and his alienness, was endeavouring to please while at the same time, peasantlike, he pursued his own advantage. Even I, puzzled as I was to realise that I had produced him, could not hate him with any thoroughness. I disliked him, I distrusted him, I was very jealous because Henry preferred him to any of his legitimate sons and rated him almost as highly as he rated the other Geoffrey, Rosamonde Clifford’s bastard, but there were times when something he said, acutely intelligent or witty or flattering, would disarm me. Several times during my banishment—but always when his father was overseas—John had arrived at Winchester to pay me a visit; always he brought some present, most carefully chosen wine, preserved fruit, game, trivial yet showing that he understood exactly my circumstances. I would be on my dignity with him at first but he would ignore that or, rather, use his awareness of it to spur him to greater efforts and he would retail me all the gossip of the court and reel off every funny story he had heard and be, for an hour or so, a most charming companion.