The Lute Player (18 page)

‘Brother John,’ said Richard quite softly, ‘little Brother John Lackland! That should be easy. Little Greedy-guts sticking to Father because Father has the key to the pantry! We’ll see! I’ll make a bargain. I’ll tell him that if he joins me
now
I’ll leave him in control when I go on crusade. If I am King, as I hope to be, I’ll make him regent of England; if not, I’ll give him power in Aquitaine. Given authority anywhere, he’d wring himself out a fortune in six months! And just to make the bargain sweeter, I’ll promise him not to breed an heir until I return from the Holy Land. And that will give him something to pray for.’

So many vehement protests formed in my mind then that I hardly knew which to voice first. John in the saddle in England would mean trouble within a fortnight; John in the saddle in Aquitaine would drive my duchy into the arms of France in seven days. Hadn’t this great, magnificent, silly perspicacity enough to see that? Of course it was a bribe which was certain to bring John to his side and Richard, being what he was, had no thought of anything but the immediate—fighting; he was taking John up as a man lifts a weapon. I could see all this. But it would be dangerous to say so. I would leave that, I thought, until later. I merely said:

‘Oh, Richard, that would be an ill thing to promise. You should get the crown on your head and at least two healthy boys at heel before you go crusading at all.’

At that he gave a hearty laugh in which there was no tinge of bitterness.

‘A fine thing to say to a man who has just lost his betrothed!’

‘A small loss,’ I said, ‘and the world is full of young women.’ I said it absent-mindedly for, thinking back to the affair of Alys and my husband, I had remembered something.

‘Richard, a while back when you spoke of discovering this business you mentioned a French lute player who aided you. If we’re going to keep this affair secret and tell only Philip the real truth, what of that fellow? Is he clacking all over London at this moment? How much does he know?’

‘Not being deaf, everything. He was in the anteroom—I’d borrowed his lute and he waited to recover it. The King and I both bellowed at the top of our voices and Madam squealed like a stuck pig. At that moment I didn’t care who knew or who clacked—I meant to clack myself.’

‘He must be found and his weasand slit at once,’ I said. I thought rapidly. ‘I’ll attend to it. Alberic is at hand. He brought me news of your arrival some days ago and I asked him to remain in the district so that I could send you a message if you failed to come. If the fellow has blabbed already, his throat being cut so promptly will give pause to others who think to spread the story and at worst it may find its way into a ballad, like the Fair Rosamonde tale which already they call a legend. What was this lute player like?’

‘He had white hair,’ said Richard, frowning in an attempt to remember. ‘But he wasn’t old. I noted him little at the time. He played very well and spoke French like a Frenchman.’

‘He should be easy to find,’ I said. ‘Alberic shall go to London this morning.’

‘I also, in search of John,’ Richard said. He rose and came towards me and laid his arm across my shoulders. ‘Be of good cheer, Mother. Before we meet again things may have altered. If God has any justice I shall win this time. We’ll enjoy our freedom together!’

I found myself repeating my pleadings with him to be careful, not to take unnecessary risks. That made him impatient and our leavetaking was, in the end, abrupt and lacking in sentiment. As soon as he was gone I sent for Alberic, pretending that I was in need of sewing materials. He took my strange order with his usual calmness and set off. It was some weeks before he wandered in again, bringing as his excuse some lace which, he said, was too good and expensive to offer to any but the highest ladies in the land.

He had failed to find the white-haired French lute player, though he had learned his identity and made a thorough search for him. But he brought, he said, news of all kinds. The poor little Princess of France had fallen into such a state of ill-health that all thought of her marriage must be abandoned. She was leaving London. Some said that she was returning to her own land, others that she was going to the nuns at Rumsey, others that the King was making her a permanent establishment at Windsor as though she were his own daughter. Of the true reason for the breaking of the betrothal arrangements Alberic had obviously heard no whisper of rumour, for even when I had plied him well with my detestable breakfast ale, saved for the purpose, and he was in the maudlin state in which any natural delicacy he possessed which might have held him silent on that subject to me would be abandoned my most cunning and leading questions drew blank. The lute player had vanished and he had not clacked. Putting those two facts together, I came to the conclusion that Henry himself had taken steps to ensure his silence.

Meanwhile I had other things to think of, for Alberic brought other news. Duke Richard, he told me, had had another quarrel with the King about the supervision kept on him and the authority imposed by the royal officials.

‘Unless they are withdrawn,’ he is said to have shouted, ‘they shall all share the fate of Salisbury and his lickspittles who were sent to hold my mother down in 1168.’ (In that ill-omened year Henry had sent me back to my duchy, ostensibly to control and consolidate but he had sent the earl and a great horde of officials to do the real ruling; and my fierce people, insulted on their own account and on mine, rose and made mincemeat of Salisbury and his men, all in one bloody day.)

‘And if they share his fate—nay, if one of them is so much as touched—you shall share your mother’s fate,’ Henry bellowed back.

That was their last talk together. Richard went back to Aquitaine, and already Henry was mustering men and making arrangements to leave England.

II

Soon there was no need for me to depend upon Alberic for news. Every tongue wagged with it. The young French King and the young Duke of Aquitaine, ‘united as never before’—a noteworthy phrase—began the attack; Henry of England rode to meet the challenge but something was wrong with him from the beginning. Age? Disillusion? The carelessness bred of long dominion? Whatever the reason, he took only a small army, largely composed of mercenaries, and the young allies, ‘united as never before,’ very soon established their superiority.

It may be grossly sentimental of me but I always believed that the affair of Alys destroyed something in Henry. The seduction of his son’s betrothed, a young girl who had been entrusted to his care, who had literally been like one of his own children, was something which, in the heat of passion, he could square with his own conscience and with his own peculiar attitude towards God—so long as it was secret. But now he knew that Richard knew and he must have guessed that, since the two young men were now firm allies, Richard had told Alys’s brother the reason for the breaking of the match. And I think Henry was ashamed who had never known shame in his life. The three met, we are told, in a farcical attempt to arrange matters peaceably and Richard and Philip, after some puerile chat, marched out of the conference place laughing with their arms linked. Henry must have known why they were laughing and why they were so firmly linked against him.

They took his most beloved town, Le Mans, and burned it. Henry, defeated, wounded and in great pain, sat on his horse and looked back at the flaming town and then vented his fury in words of unparalleled audacity. ‘Since God has seen fit to take from me that which. I most valued, I will take from Him that which we are told He values most—my immortal soul!’

After that, tended and comforted by his bastard, Geoffrey, Rosamonde Clifford’s son, he rode to his lodging and there he received the insolent, domineering terms upon which his son and his son’s ally were prepared to make peace. Amongst the demands was the forgiveness of all his subjects who had taken arms against him. He roused himself to ask who, and how many, they were. And the son of his mistress took list in hand and read out the names. Amongst them was the name of John. Just as Richard and I had planned.

It was the final blow. They said that he groaned out, ‘John too. My well-beloved son. Now my cup is full.’ With that he turned his face to the wall, refused food, medical attention, the priests’ ministrations, and so died.

And Richard was King of England and lord of the whole Angevin empire, just as I had hoped and planned. And I was free to leave my prison at Winchester and take my rightful place in the world after sixteen years of exile.

But something had happened to me, too. Just as the exposure of his love affair with Alys bad made an old man of Henry, so Henry’s death had made an old woman of me. For so many reasons that even the long night watches when I lay wakeful were hardly long enough to suffice for me to sort them out.

I lay in my new bed, most comfortably feathered and covered, and I mourned for Henry. He had treated me ill and I had hated him and had waited for his death these many years, yet I mourned the manner of it. There was something about that defiant outcry of his against God that roused my blood. It was admirable, manly, and it fitted the young Henry as I remembered him when he first visited the French court with his father and we looked at one another, he a youth of seventeen, I a queen, twelve years his elder. I would think of that and sometimes I actually found myself wishing that I had been a woman of another sort, cut to the pattern of his paramours, meek, pretty, feminine counterparts of the man who could go to his death defying God. If I had been such a woman I might have held him but the very part of me that made me appreciate his daring made it impossible for me to live with him in peace and endure his lordship meekly. That was the paradox. Any one of his women outside that burning town would have cried, “Oh, Henry, oh my dear, don’t, you’ll surely go to hell!” I should have cried, “
Bravissimo!
” But then, any one of his women, told to do this or that or not to do anything at all, would have said, “Yes, Henry.” I always said, “Why?” or “Have you thought…?” or “In God’s name that is folly!” We were ill matched and we came, as husband and wife, to an ill end.

Other times in the night I lay awake and thought about the price Richard had paid for his victory.

And if my mourning for the lost days and the failure of my marriage may have been feminine sentimentality, my fears for the future were every one of them logical and well founded. Time proved that. Richard had gained the allegiance of Philip and of John. And between them they brought him to victory. But at what cost!

I have lived long enough to see the final result of that alliance which made Richard and Philip ‘united as never before’ and sent them swaggering out of Henry’s presence laughing, their arms linked. Implacable hatred, that was the result. And for a very curious reason, a reason which seems to be unknown to all the makers of ballads and the singers of songs who go jingling on about the Third Crusade and the differences which arose between Philip of France and Richard of England. They all attribute Philip’s hatred of Richard to jealousy, jealousy of his size and strength, his valour, his skill in fighting and his popularity with the common soldiery. All of that may be true but I believe that the trouble between them began, though it lay dormant for a while, on the day when Richard found Philip hunting, drew him away from his entourage and said:

‘My father and your sister are lovers. I shall not marry her and him I shall fight to the death. Now, Philip of France, will you side with me or with that lecher and that whore?’

Richard told me himself that those were his words. Blunt, tactless, inconsiderate and to the point. And the question naturally put Philip in a very awkward position. It would have been a difficult question for any man to answer but for Philip it was peculiarly so. For Philip had inherited from his father, my first husband, a pious streak and he took very seriously such a choice between his personal inclination and his moral obligation. In such a situation a man, according to whether he is hedonist or idealist, must make his choice; and Philip found the choice hard because in him the two were balanced. His sound good sense bade him to keep out of this quarrel; his piety forbade him to side, even by neutrality, with a lecher and a whore. Richard’s blunt words had left him no loophole and in the end he came out on Richard’s side and for a time drowned his doubts by a violent partisanship. But he always, I think, cherished a resentment against the man who had forced the decision on him. He repeatedly proposed, after Henry’s death, that Richard should let bygones be bygones and marry Alys after all.

‘Had you not been so tardy a lover that accident would never have happened; and it is no worse than marrying a widow,’ he said on one occasion when the question of Alys’s future cropped up. Richard, with an ill-timed humour, replied that a man was forbidden by Holy Church to marry his father’s widow! That kind of joke went down ill with Philip who was monkish and had all the monk’s outward attention to form and inward sly evasion. Philip may have disliked Richard for many reasons and he may have regarded him with deadly envy but many little signs, particularly Philip’s attitude towards the woman Richard did marry, point to an enmity beginning on the day when Richard made his blunt decision and then used a moral lever to force Philip make an equally blunt one.

And then there was John. No evasion of the promise and the bribe was possible now. Richard had said that John should be his regent if he were King before he went on crusade. He was King and he had taken the Cross side by side with Philip in the new crusade which William of Tyre was urging throughout Christendom. So in a matter of a few months England would lie at John’s feet and suffer all the misrule that can spring from authority without responsibility. Just at the moment when the most sound, most cautious government was needed to hold the country in trust for its absent King a reckless, selfish, greedy savage child would be in control.

I worried incessantly and I resented it for, apart from such mental discomforts, my life had come out into a pleasant place. In some ways the change was comic. When the breath went out of Henry’s body Nicholas of Saxham, erstwhile my gaoler, became my subservient slave and Glanville, who had never taken his overseership seriously enough to care whether I lived or died, became most attentive. There was no more brown ale; the wine appeared on my table almost as suddenly as it did at the wedding in Cana; all my clothes and a good many of my jewels were returned to me. Did I wish a fire, the day being chill? Would I care to ride, the day being fine? Overnight I changed from being an unwanted, unloved wife of a king to a cherished queen mother. Sometimes I thought wryly of all the women whose sun had set over their husband’s graves; mine had known a belated but brilliant redawning. Before ever Richard had come back for his crowning I was besieged by fawning suitors and I lost count of the petitions and requests which came to me—often accompanied by gifts—as a means of reaching the King’s ear. I ignored them all and the only request I made to Richard at that time was a purely personal one.