The Lute Player (53 page)

‘And it would hurt her,’ Joanna said, ‘to see me, her useless daughter, safe and sound, while Richard—’ She burst into her ready tears.

But Egidio had grown impatient. By this time the stories had come in, dozens of conflicting tales, credited and then proved false and one day he had said, ‘We have our lives to live when all is said and done.’ So he had dressed himself in his best, chosen his retainers, kissed Joanna heartily and ridden off to Rouen to seek Eleanor’s approval. ‘And if she doesn’t like me I shall merely regret her bad taste in men and come back and marry you out of hand,’ he had said cheerfully.

The news of Richard’s new appearance reached Le Mans just at the moment when Egidio was expected back. Between the two excitements Joanna was almost demented.

Egidio was late in returning, so we dismissed everybody and sat up by ourselves with food waiting on the side table and the necessities for mulled wine ready to hand for the night was very chilly.

When at last he arrived his ordinarily pleasant face was set in sulky lines and he had, I think, been drinking. His manner, as we all rushed forward clamouring for news, was at odds with his usual courtesy. Pushing us aside, he strode to the fire and held out his stiff hands, then swung round.

‘So the tale has travelled this far.’

‘Just the bare news,’ Joanna said. ‘We were hoping—’

‘Your mother,’ he burst out angrily, ‘couldn’t spare a moment even to
see
me. She was closeted all day, writing letters to the Pope!’ A fine contempt flavoured the last words. At that moment he was a rather pampered small boy whom some adult, busy with some ridiculous adult concern, had brushed aside.

‘Oh dear,’ said Joanna, tactfully pretending to a disappointment which at the moment she could not feel because her mind was engaged with the other subject. ‘Still, oh, my lord, if this good news is true, we can have Richard at our wedding and that would be more than we dared hope. Tell us, is it true?’

‘My honey-sweet love,’ the count said, snatching up the cold fowl from the side table and pulling off a leg which he proceeded to gnaw and champ as he talked, ‘How could it be true? There was the shipmaster, wasn’t there, who saw the King in Malta and the archer who recognised him in Sherwood Forest and the milkmaid to whom he spoke in Caen? This time it is a lute player who “lost” his master outside Vienna, couldn’t look for him thoroughly because he was ill and then thought he’d better plod back to Rouen and just mention the matter—’

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. ‘Then it could be true. There was a lute player—and the belt found in Vienna.’

‘There you are,’ the count said, pointing the chicken bone at me accusingly. ‘It’s the credulity of people that encourages these tales.’ He was so angry because Eleanor had failed to give him her attention that he choose to overlook the fact that it was he who had brought home for us the stories about Malta and Sherwood and half a dozen more and had shared our excitement and speculations. This new story had rendered his errand vain, therefore he would have none of it. ‘Consider, Lady Anna, the things which make this story unbelievable. In the first place, the young man asserts that he set out with Richard to travel overland. Now everyone knows—and the Bishop of Salisbury gives his oath—that Richard embarked for a sea voyage from Acre to Dover. The minstrel, like all the rest of them, is inspired by a crazy desire for notice; and of course, being a professional spinner of tales, he embroiders his with several pleasing little touches which were lacking in the others. “I lost him at Eedburg near Vienna.” How, can you tell me, does one “lose” a man the size of Richard Plantagenet? Not in a fight, not from sickness, oh no, just lost like a pin in the grass.’ He threw the chicken bone into the fire. ‘What I detest and deplore about these tales,’ he said more gravely, ‘is their effect on people to whom Richard was dear.’ His eyes traveled from Joanna to Berengaria. ‘They keep open a wound that should have been healing now. Richard, God rest his soul in peace, was shipwrecked and drowned; he should be mourned and Masses said for his soul and—’

And forgotten! I thought. The broken threads knitted up again into the implacable pattern of life and young men who wanted to marry young women should be properly received and listened to. I looked at Berengaria; after all, we were talking of her husband, of the man she had desperately loved once, even though…

She was breathing pantingly; I could see her breast palpitating unevenly under her bodice.

‘If Blondel says he lost Richard near Vienna, Richard was lost near Vienna, Count Egidio,’ she gasped out. ‘I know Blondel went with him from Acre and I have known Blondel very well for a long time and never known him to tell a lie. Or seek notice. He went with Richard to Jerusalem and every courier that came back brought us letters—as Anna can testify—precise and honest and never once concerned with his own exploits. What is more, he promised me long ago that he would take care of Richard for me; and if he “lost” him we can be quite certain that some kind of treachery was at work.’ Apart from a slight breathlessness, her voice was controlled and when she moved from us towards the side table where the cold viands stood, she moved so smoothly and quietly that I imagined she was about to offer Egidio more to eat or help herself to wine. Instead she picked up the big silver bell which we used to summon the pages and shook it so vigorously that the sound pealed through the whole house.

‘I’m going to Rouen,’ she said, setting the bell down. ‘If many people think as you do, Count Egidio—and I have no doubt they will, after so many false stories—I must go and do my utmost to prove to them that this one is true. And I must see Blondel and hear the whole story from his own lips.’

‘I will come with you,’ I cried, for she had spoken the very words I had in mind.

‘I shall ride hard,’ she said warningly.

‘And I.’

Joanna stood looking from one to the other of us.

‘I can’t stay here alone. Had I—shall I—’ She looked at the count. She did not wish to leave him; on the other hand, he had only just come back and could hardly be expected to ride out again that night.

‘Count Egidio will escort us, of course,’ Berengaria said sweetly and I swear even I could not tell whether she spoke in innocence or guile. ‘It is the King’s business we ride on.’ She turned to the sleepy page who, smoothing his tousled hair, appeared in the doorway and gave him his orders. Daughter of a long line of kings, wife to a king, at that moment she was fit mate for a king; magnificently wearing the ornament of glass and tin as though it were priceless.

IV

I was shocked by the change in Eleanor. Often enough in Pamplona, Brindisi and in Messina I had been astonished by the way in which she had retained not only her vitality of body, her vigour of mind, but her looks. She had come out to Navarre straight from sixteen years’ retirement, virtual imprsonment in Winchester, and sometimes it seemed to me that those sixteen years had been a preservative like the wax a good housewife rubs into eggshells to keep them fresh through the winter. She had emerged with energy unimpaired, wits undimmed and the looks of a much younger woman. Now she looked her full age and more. Her handsome, firmly fleshed face had shrunken and in shrinking had fallen into heavy harassed lines; the colour had gone from it and here and there, around her mouth, in the hollow temples and eye sockets, an ugly brown pigmentation spread a stain. Her plentiful hair was now completely white and seemed too heavy, too lifeless to be manageable and she had contracted a nervous habit of pushing her hands through it.

But the old fire still burned undiminished.

Despite all the hard pressure to which Berengaria had subjected us, the journey from Le Mans to Rouen had taken almost three days; by the time we arrived the new story was seven or eight days old and Eleanor had not been idle. Letters to the Pope, letters to the Emperor, Henry the Stern, letters to Leopold of Austria were speeding on their way.

Before we had laid aside our mire-encrusted cloaks or warmed our hands Eleanor was telling us of the steps she had taken towards Richard’s release. They included one of the true, typical Aquitainian touches, the kind of crafty opportunism which in the past had gained Eleanor her name, the “She-wolf.”

‘I told Leopold quite frankly that if he gave me his aid now I would give him my granddaughter, my namesake Eleanor, whom they call the Pearl of Brittany, to be his wife. In Acre he often spoke of her to me; he saw her once in Bruges and when he talked the lust showed in his eyes. And I told him plainly then that I had lived long enough to realise the folly—and the wrong—of these forced, arranged matches. I said that I should always support the little wench’s own choice—within the right degrees. He used to squirm at that, knowing full well that no girl with good sight and the freedom to choose would choose to marry him! But all that is altered now and if he will exert himself—he has great influence on the Emperor—I am prepared to sacrifice the girl. She is young; she will outlive him with any luck, and then—like you, Joanna—she can marry the man she favours.’

Joanna, who had married the man her father had chosen for her, and Berengaria, who had been prepared to die rather than marry Isaac of Cyprus, were both, now that they knew that Eleanor had accepted Blondel’s story and taken action, prepared to be diverted by this mention of matrimonial arrangements. Dropping their mired cloaks, kicking off their wet shoes, they pressed about the fire, asking questions about the Pearl of Brittany, calculating the force of the bribe Eleanor had offered.

‘But of what value,’ I felt myself bound to ask, ‘is a bribe to the archduke when we do not even know
where
Richard is being held? Suppose he is out of Leopold’s jurisdiction or the Emperor’s? There are a number of German princes and all, I understand, very independent and absolute in their own domains.’

‘That,’ said Eleanor, swinging around to face me, ‘is the heart of the matter. We don’t know. We know that he disappeared at Eedburg, a little place near Vienna; but who took him, and why and where he is now, there is no telling.’ She pushed her hands through her hair. ‘It is the uncertainty… And Richard in prison would fret like an eagle caged. Still, the Pope, if he will act—
all
Christendom minds him; and Leopold, well bribed, could act if he held him or he knew that the Emperor did. What more could I do?’

I did not say it but I remembered what I had once heard, that many German princes gave only lip service to the Pope. Half of them weren’t even Christian, though they chose to be regarded, for mundane reasons, as part of Christendom. The vast, loosely-knit body over which Henry the Stern held nominal sway and which was called the Empire was composed of some very old, varying elements. More than a thousand years had passed since Attila and his Huns had swept over Europe; they had been fought, defeated, absorbed and forgotten; in places, save for the wanton destruction they had wrought, they had left little mark. But in parts of what they called the Empire the Huns had remained, a hard core of alien culture; immensely brave, unconquerably tribal, curiously indulgent to women, children, horses and hounds, merciless to their enemies and given to the worship of strange gods. There was a place called Gastein, for example, where they worshiped the “spirit” of a great waterfall which came tumbling down from the mountains through a narrow gorge. And every Midsummer Day a young girl, the prettiest unpockmarked virgin in the district, was thrown into its boiling torrent; and for the next twelve months her family was honoured, regarded as holy, so materially favoured that there was a great deal of competition when it came to selecting the victim. The Pope wouldn’t approve of that! And a papal letter, sent to such a community, wouldn’t have much effect. Nor in the province of Tulzburg where a curious form of cannibalism still survived and one ate with great ceremony certain bits of the body of a dead enemy who had showed courage, in the belief that thus his courage entered into one.

Odds and scraps of knowledge which I had harboured in mind as a needlewoman stores bits in her rag bag. They couldn’t be mentioned in the presence of Richard’s wife, mother, sister. But I could and I did say, ‘I think the first thing to do is to find out, if possible, exactly where in the Empire he is held.’

‘But how?’ Eleanor asked, pushing at her hair again. ‘That is why I offered Leopold a bribe—so that there should be one person in power anxious to find him, if possible, and let us know the truth; for it is all too evident that both John and the King of France will find it to their advantage to keep him hidden and locked up until he dies. Unless Leopold swallows the bait, how should we ever know?’

She looked so wild-eyed that I hastened to say comforting things. And saying them, I waited to hear Berengaria mention Blondel, ask to see him, listen to his story. But she seemed to be content now that she knew that Eleanor had believed him and taken action and she and Joanna, with their feet to the fire, completely relaxed after the long hard ride, drifted off into a conversation mainly concerned with the value of Pearl of Brittany as a bribe and the chances of Leopold’s rising to the bait. They remembered and commented upon his susceptibility to Princess Lydia and from that passed on to a discussion of exactly what the forbidden degrees of relationship were and how far the Pope was empowered to overrule them; and they tried to remember whether ever, in history, uncle and niece had been legally married. It was a true-to-pattern waiting women’s conversation, the kind of thing which Berengaria ordinarily avoided with great fastidiousness but which she could tolerate from Joanna. It made me so furious that I longed to knock their heads together. But it went on and in the end I was forced to say:

‘And the boy who brought back this story, where is he, madam? I should be interested to hear his account. ‘

‘He should be in Canterbury now,’ Eleanor said. ‘I sent him to tell his story to Hubert Walter after the clerks had taken it down for me to copy in my letters. You see, Anna, there was always the fact that the story Blondel told was in direct contradiction to all that Walter had been asserting all this time and I did think that it would be both test and proof of the boy’s veracity if he could face the bishop himself. It’s all very difficult to explain now,’ she said, and her hands went to her hair in that distracted gesture. ‘I believed the boy implicitly… I had reason to believe that when Richard left Palestine he would—well; take
some
companion, inconspicuous, useful, agreeable. And Blondel had been with him throughout the whole campaign. What more natural, eh?’ The straight stare of her pale eyes, paler than ever in their dark sockets, was frank—but defiantly frank. I thought: she knows and what a thing for a mother to know! But I still was not convinced that Blondel—‘I believed him implicitly,’ she repeated, ‘but I felt that if I wrote to Hubert Walter and said, “A minstrel, a lute player, has come in with such-and-such a story,” the man would tend to disregard it. There have been so many stories. And I felt that the boy, if there were a flaw in his tale, would have hesitated to face Walter with it. Walter knew him and—’

And what you
think
is his history, I added. Aloud I said, ‘You are a very clever woman, madam.’ And I meant it from my heart.

‘Women are not meant to be clever,’ she said harshly and her eyes turned eloquently towards the fire where Berengaria and Joanna chatted. ‘Men hate clever women and so does God, Anna Apieta. And I recognise His hatred and I think that makes Him angrier than ever. How can I believe that God is my friend when things go the way they do? Of my four beautiful boys—for even John is beautiful and could charm a bird from a tree if he so wished—two remain. Richard lies in some unknown dungeon and John depopulates his brother’s kingdom with fire and sword. Truly, nothing I care for flourishes and nothing I have a hand in prospers.’