The Passionate Brood (11 page)

It was not the first time Blondel had seen a royal Angevin rage; but the late King, being of shorter stature, had never looked so terrible. Facing a charge of Saracens with whirling scimitars, such as he had been picturing down at the harbour, would surely seem child’s play compared with this! He was in the habit of obeying the King’s lightest command, and his heart beat hard in his breast. But he held his ground gamely.

Richard glared at him like some dangerous, wounded beast. “Didn’t I tell that damned Constable I’d break every bone in his body if he whined to me about his love for Robin?” he roared. “You can spare your breath, all of you. From now on, no man shall so much as mention his name in my presence.”

“It’s not that, Sir,” corrected Blondel obstinately. “I’ve an urgent message from our lady Johanna.”

The name seemed to catch at some shred of Richard’s everyday sanity. He stopped brandishing the stool.

“We only came to tell you that our jovial brother-in-law of Sicily is dead,” drawled John, from the comparative safety of the doorway.

“Dead?” laughed Richard crazily. “Then I warrant she’ll be taking the next boat home to hold a thanksgiving service!”

“But she is imprisoned in a castle at Messina, Sir, where they are trying to force her into a second marriage with the new king, Tancred.” Blondel spoke with deliberate loudness, and Richard’s upraised arm fell slowly. The stool went crashing unheeded to the floor. “What’s that you say?” he asked, like a man waking from a drunken stupor; but interrupted before his squire had finished explaining. “My good Blondel,” he protested impatiently, “what fantastic waterfront tales have you been listening to? People don’t imprison Plantagenets!”

“She sent a ring, Sir.”

“They always do!” scoffed Richard.

But when Blondel handed it to him he moved to the light of the window, turning the little hoop of steel between strong fingers. “By God’s beard, John, it’s true!” he called incredulously over his shoulder. “Don’t you remember my twisting this for her out of Henry’s outgrown mail that day you broke the doll Becket brought her from Canterbury? You were furious, because he hadn’t brought you anything.”

John glanced at it from a discreet distance. “I remember the licking Robin gave me,” he admitted dourly.

But Richard—who remembered the excitement that always heralded that mighty prelate’s arrival, his brilliance and his lavish-ness, and above all King Henry’s joy in him—was deeply touched. “Imagine a girl keeping a thing like that all these years!” he said. He went back to the table and sat down, laying a hand on his squire’s shoulder in passing. “I’m sorry, Blondel,” he said simply.

In spite of anxiety for Johanna and grief for Robin, that brief, kindly pressure seemed to readjust Blondel’s world. Unobtrusively, he set a drink at his master’s elbow and straightened some of the signs of his violence.

“Send this Sicilian fellow up,” ordered Richard curtly, already ashamed of his rage. “And for God’s sake, John, stop lounging there quizzing the rest of us as if we were some sort of show, and come and make yourself useful. Having been educated for the church, you are better at languages than I.”

John came pleasantly enough. “If what the man says seems to be true, I suppose you will sail at once?” he asked; and because he stooped obligingly to gather up the scattered parchments, Richard failed to notice the satisfied smirk spreading across his handsome features.

“And Heaven help Tancred’s volcano-ridden island when I get there!” he snarled. “Daring to detain a sister of mine—”

“
And
her dowry!” John reminded him. “With that she could have afforded to marry almost any man she fancied—to make up for the way her desires must have starved with William. So let’s hope Tancred hasn’t been
too
pressing. Not that it would matter so much—
now
!” he added negligently.

Richard glared at him as the implication sank in. Already he had begun to be ravaged by remorse about Robin—and now there was Johanna’s lost happiness. After the Sicilian had been interviewed and rewarded, he sent for Mercadier and the captains of his fleet. They came crowding into the little room, their cloaks dripping raindrops to the floor. Clearly and concisely he gave them their orders. They were to weigh anchor at dawn and set their course for Sicily.

“But I thought you had arranged to meet Philip at Marseilles?” ventured John, comfortably aware that nothing this side of death would hold his brother back now.

“He’ll have to meet me at Messina instead,” barked Richard; and before they were in their beds he was out in the bailey mounting his swiftest horse.

“At least let me get you a cloak!” implored Blondel.

“I shall ride the lighter without one,” shouted Richard, above the buffeting of the wind.

“If he rides like that he’ll go back to the Devil who made his temper!” muttered the Constable, watching the sparks strike from his horse’s hooves in the darkness beneath the barbican.

But Richard was already swallowed up in the blustering wildness of the night—riding towards the woods as unsparingly as he swept across a tilt yard—unarmed and uncloaked, soaked to the skin like any serf. Bare-headed and sore-hearted because, in the terrible anger he had never learned to govern, he had spoiled the happiness of two of the four people he loved best on earth. Too proud, still, to revoke a decree made in anger—too generous to sail for Sicily without trying to tell Robin that Johanna was free.

But in the deeper darkness of the woods the going was hard; and wet, overhanging boughs whipped blood from his cheek. Hunting by daylight, he had supposed that he knew these pleasant, grassy rides; but now their direction baffled him. He hadn’t the woodman’s sense. Or was it, he wondered, ripping his flying tunic from a malevolent thorn bush, because he wasn’t wholly English? The thought irritated him unreasonably. With all his superior knowledge of the world, he would never know these woods as Robin did. Robin, who knew instinctively which way a frightened doe would bound to cover—whose green jerkin always merged so uncannily into the forest foliage that the very trees seemed to protect him. Robin, whose lost friendship had felt like the great, sturdy heart of an oak…

Johanna Plantagenet slept late. Because she had been watching most of the night for a humble little fishing boat to cross the narrow straits from Italy, she missed the grandeur of the avenging armada that came for her at dawn. Being a thoroughly healthy young woman, comfortably housed in a massive tower, she even slept through all the clamour of sudden panic and invasion, and began to stir only when the sun rode high in the cloudless Sicilian sky and somebody began banging on her door.

Except to hunch a protesting shoulder and to turn the burnished glory of her head on her pillow, Johanna took no notice of the banging. People had been bringing gifts from her persistent suitor ever since she had fled from his blandishments to this castle at Messina. Unfortunately the castle, like everything else on the island, now belonged to Tancred. But, being the widowed queen of a civilised country, at least she still retained the privilege of a bolt to her bedroom door.

At first this
siege d’amour
had been rather amusing. Johanna knew plenty of marriageable princesses who would give their ears to be shut up in a castle because a rich and romantic king like Tancred wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. But she had had ten years of Sicily, and she wanted to go back to England. So as soon as poor William’s elaborate obsequies were over, she had made a methodical list of all her possessions and asked her brother-in-law to arrange about transport.

He had been lounging on the moonlit terrace of the winter palace at the time. “Too bad that all my ships should be laid up or at Genoa!” he had evaded politely.

“Not
your
ships, Tancred,” she had explained. “I want the ones my father sent out with my dowry when I came.” And because he had pretended to have forgotten all about them, she had thrust her list into his hand.

“You haven’t forgotten anything, have you, my sweet?” he had teased, in that silky voice of his. “Your ships and that beautiful gold table from the Abbey at Rouen. And your multi-coloured silk pavilion. You know, I always thought that provided one of the few bright spots of poor William’s tournaments.” He might have been some Semitic merchant picking up bargains in Constantinople, the way his dark eyes snapped over the list of her possessions. A few weeks earlier his dawdling interest in each item would have helped to pass the time pleasantly, but already Johanna’s brisk Northern mind had begun to accelerate to the tempo of less leisurely climates, and—with the scent of windswept English heaths almost in her nostrils—it had seemed suddenly repulsive that his clothes should smell of musk and attar of roses.

“Promise me you will have my ships overhauled this week!” she had persisted. But instead of promising anything he had asked her to stay and marry him.

“And save all this packing?” she had laughed. And then, taken off her guard, she had found the heavy Eastern perfume beating down her careless laughter. His full, lascivious lips were bruising hers, his hot hands holding her as if she were some harem favourite. And she had realised that he really meant it.

Lying in bed behind her locked door, Johanna shuddered at the memory of his embraces, but she was honest enough to admit that in the past she had seldom discouraged him. During ten years she had been tenderly compassionate to William—patient with his stricken body and understanding about his embittered mind. But she was no saint…Throughout her exile she had grasped at every compensating pleasure. She had let Tancred make light-hearted love to her from the day she first landed, and had been grateful to him for a hundred diversions. He had been the perfect brother-in-law, taking her to watch the snaring of wild beasts among the rugged mountains and sitting beside her in the multi-coloured pavilion to watch the tournaments. But the men Johanna had been brought up amongst were seldom spectators. They did their own killing, on the battlefield, in the forest, or down in the lists. And that was the only kind of man she had any use for as a husband.

When a whole tornado of blows rained upon her door she got up reluctantly and began to wash in the water from a tall stone jar. She had only to call, of course, and a whole bevy of obsequious servants would come running. But they were Tancred’s creatures. Since she had pitted her will against his, he had sent away her own women. So, with independent pride, she preferred to dress herself. And, having been brought up so simply by Hodierna, she found it no very great hardship.

“If it’s pomegranates or peacocks you’ve brought this time, you can take them back to your master,” she called, over a bare shoulder. “And tell him that when I marry again it will be to please myself!”

But whoever it was did not go away, and when she had finished sluicing about with the water she became aware of a man’s voice, very full of impatience and authority. Definitely no cringing courtier or timid tiring woman. “Tancred himself!” thought Johanna, hastily reaching for her shift. Hurriedly she donned her tight-sleeved under-dress and slipped over her head a becoming
bliaut
with fur-trimmed sleeves. “Break open that door and I’ll fling myself down on the rocks!” she defied rather shakily, as the iron bolt shook in its sockets.

To her horror, it looked as if he would drive her to the test. There was a splitting of wood and one of the sockets shot across the floor. Never would she have believed the elegant Tancred capable of such vigour. Fear gripped her—the sex fear that puts even the bravest woman at a disadvantage. “I’ve sent word to my brother Richard,” she confessed, retreating to the window. “When he comes he’ll lay waste your miserable towns and harbours. And when he f-finds my broken body down there he’ll throw yours to his d-dogs!”

But her invader only laughed at the high-sounding threat and, as bolt and door burst inwards together, he stood flushed with exertion on her threshold.

“Richard!” cried Johanna, incredulously. Comb and mirror clattered to the floor as she hurled herself upon him.

“A fine welcome,” he grumbled, licking a bleeding knuckle, “when a man has come over a thousand miles!”

“I thought you were Tancred,” apologised Johanna. “How quickly you must have got my message!”

Richard’s face was momentarily shadowed by the memory of that shameful night when he had received it. He felt again the goad of Robin’s cool laughter, his own suffocating rage, and the wildness of his fruitless searching of the woods. “If it hadn’t been for Blondel I shouldn’t have had it at all,” he admitted.

But Johanna was safely in his arms, pressing against the fine new cross on his breast, her stripling height dwarfed by his maturity. “If that scented dago has hurt a hair of your head—” he threatened, torn between tenderness and ferocity.

Johanna began to laugh weakly at the conventional phrase. It was so like him to use it. He was always too intent upon whatever he was doing to be plagued by a sense of the ridiculous as were she and John. And in his exhilarating presence even her imaginary plight of a few moments back seemed half a joke. “No, no. Tancred isn’t as bad as that,” she assured him. “Actually, he was quite amusing and kind until he thought he could bluff me into marrying him.”

“It took me just two hours to cure him of
that
illusion,” swaggered Richard. “You should have seen his toy soldiers run when my bowman cleared the harbour walls! No discipline at all.” He surveyed the semi-Oriental luxury of her room with distaste. Like most open-air men, he was awkward in any room that was not sparsely furnished. “Haven’t they any wholesome rushes here?” he demanded, stooping to detach one of his spurs from a priceless Persian rug.

“Don’t be so old-fashioned!” bridled Johanna. “This is a much finer castle than Rouen or Oxford.”

“It
was,
you mean,” grinned Richard. “When Mercadier brought a battering ram ashore we made your lover’s new ornamental gates look like the Londoners’ booths after St. Bartholomew’s fair. Didn’t you hear all the din?”

Johanna had to admit that she had slept through it all. Surreptitiously, she smoothed the untidy huddle of her bed covers lest he should think that she, too, had grown soft in this pleasure garden of an island. “I sat up late—watching for a special fishing boat,” she tried to excuse herself confusedly. “I saw her come in under the horns of a new moon, which is said to be lucky. And now my luck really does seem to have turned. Your ships and my little boat arriving on the same day, and my being a widow. Of course, I don’t mean anything against William, God rest his poor cheated body and weary soul! But just that I am free—” Because of the years separating her girlhood from his new air of poise and authority, the rare constraint of shyness gripped her. “It
does
mean that I am free, doesn’t it, Richard?” she asked, glancing up anxiously at the stern lines on his bronzed face and wondering if he were so much changed that he would want to make a diplomatic pawn of her as their father had done.

But Richard took no particular pleasure in the power his position gave him over other people’s lives. “What else do you suppose I came for?” he said, with a reassuring laugh. “Come and see!”

She followed him to the window, catching her breath in ecstasy at sight of his war fleet in Messina bay. “Oh, Dickon, all the proud ships with sunlit sails—just as you promised! And before ever they went crusading you brought them here for me!”

Although she was widowed and a queen, Johanna slipped a hand into his, with a gesture out of their past. Shyness and submission were wiped out. They stood side by side, these two Plantagenets, drinking in the joy of his creation. Because Berengaria had not yet come, this was perhaps the most perfect moment of their companionship. Each rakish ratline, each arrogant pennant and defiant prow of that crusading fleet satisfied some urge deep down in both of them. There was no question about what it had cost or whether he should have come. How had he managed without her all these years, Richard wondered, when no one in the world shared his reactions to life so completely? “And when I do bring them you sleep like an unimaginative cow!” he said, with the convincing rudeness of family affection.

“I shall never forgive myself!” she murmured remorsefully. “What I would have given to see them come sailing in! The old dragons of England, the leopards of Anjou, and the lovely lilies of France!”

It seemed that her rhapsody about the lilies was a little ill-timed. Letting go her hand, Richard said curtly, “Yes, Philip is here.”

“You haven’t quarrelled with him already, have you? The whole thing will be hopeless if you start like that—”

“He’s so diplomatic,” complained Richard, lounging in the warm sunshine by her window. “He and this Tancred have been bowing and scraping to each other already. We Normans and English do all the fighting while the French go and smooth things over in the town and take all the best billets, leaving me to sleep like a camp follower anywhere I can find room.”

“You must sleep here. I specially want you to come to dinner.”

“Of course, my dear. But if I don’t keep an eye on Philip he’ll be signing a treaty with the fellow. But I suppose things always
are
awkward,” laughed Richard ruefully, “when two men both think they’re leading the same expedition!”

“Believe me, Philip’s being here is a whole lot more awkward than that!” agreed Johanna gloomily.

“You mean because he still expects me to marry Ann?”

Johanna glanced behind her at the door. It was hanging on its hinges, half open, and she was aware that some of her women, agog with curiosity, had been inventing errands to pass and repass her room. The whole castle was alive with the tramp of soldiers, lay-brothers attending to the wounded and frightened servants passing each other on the stairs carrying all manner of things for the reception of the French king’s retinue. The panic of invasion seemed to have shattered all privacy. “Listen, Richard,” she said, lowering her voice. “Your mother and Berengaria are here.”

He was down from the window step and at her side in a couple of strides. “What? Mother and Berengaria
here
? Already?” he cried deliriously, wasting all her caution. “My dear Joan, you’re wonderful”

“A sort of off-set for your war-like fleet,” she murmured modestly. “In the old days it was always
you
doing things for
me
, you remember?”

“But how on earth did you manage to get them here?”

“In the fishing boat I was watching for. You see, Mother wrote to me from Brindisi as soon as she heard that William was dead. I gathered that she was staying there more or less incognito. She said she would try to come across and see me and perhaps we could travel back to England together. But she couldn’t come until she had despatched a very precious Spanish cargo for you to the East. The vendors were more than satisfied with the deal but there was some difficulty about transport owing to the state of the French market.”

“How she must enjoy shaking Europe up again after all those years at Salisbury!” laughed Richard, settling down on the window seat to listen.

“Of course, it was easy to guess what she meant,” went on Johanna. “You know the way Mother always gets her scribe to underline all the important Latin words. So I saw how I must have upset your plans, by sending word of my predicament to Dover. The only thing to do was to bribe another fisherman to fetch them both across to Messina.”

“How?”

“The Sicilian fishermen spread their nets to dry on the rocks down there,” explained Johanna, negligently. “It only meant parting with another string of William’s pearls.”

Glancing down at the foreshore, Richard appreciated Tancred’s carelessness. “You seem to have been very sure of my coming here,” he said.

“Have you or Robin ever let me down?” enquired the favourite daughter of Oxford Castle, making him hold her pin box while she braided her beautiful hair. “But I didn’t reckon on Philip. We must persuade him to go on ahead to Syria. Can’t you tell him he’s a cleverer general or a better sailor or something?”

“But he isn’t,” objected Richard stolidly. “He is sick every time we have a storm.”

“Well, at least he is liege lord of half your lands and even you can’t go sailing round the world with him and Berengaria, and leave his discarded sister at home!” pointed out Johanna irritably. Men were so exasperating, getting into a jam and then standing round without an ounce of invention waiting for one to get them out of it. After a few moments’ devoted concentration, she suggested doubtfully, “I suppose Ann must be getting a bit shop soiled by now, but wouldn’t it do if John married her?”