The Passionate Brood (12 page)

“It might—but he has probably married that flaxen-haired doll, Avisa, by now.”

“Avisa of Gloucester? A commoner!” Johanna flared out at him with unexpected bitterness. “And just because he was a man—you let him!” She snatched a final pin from the box and clipped it savagely round the end of a plait. So John, as usual, had managed to grasp at life with both hands. He would keep his stake in England and spend the best years of his life with the woman he wanted. Whereas she…A sudden storm of self-pity swept her because she knew that the first transient bloom must have gone from her beauty. She had kept the fires of youth damped down so long for William. Would she now, she wondered disconsolately, have less to give?

Richard looked at her with understanding. He wanted to tell her about Robin—that it didn’t matter now. That nothing would ever matter quite so much for either of them any more. But he could not find the words. He put down her trinket box and turned listlessly to gaze at the fine fleet for which he had fleeced England. Just so had he looked down upon it from his father’s room at Dover Castle. There had been sweet-scented Kentish rashes on the floor—and the orders all ready for his captains—and Robin. “But I’m not coming crusading,” he had said. “Cattle and crops, you know, call for as much courage as any visionary crusade…England will bleed for this.” It was always like that now, he thought angrily. In the moment of success or lovers’ meetings a pin prick of memory must come to deflate the high quality of his mood.

But his sister jolted him back to common sense. “You must bribe Philip,” she said.

“What with?” he asked succinctly.

“With Sicilian money, of course. Haven’t you just beaten our toy soldiers? Aren’t you master here? Make Tancred pay a big indemnity for holding me prisoner, and then hand it over to Philip to buy off Ann.”

Richard considered the scheme cautiously. “A sort of breach-of-promise settlement,” he said, unaware that he was making legal history. “Of course, he’ll probably say he hasn’t enough ships to go on and begin operations without me—although actually the Venetian and Austrian contingents will have arrived, and I shall probably catch them all up before any of the serious fighting begins.”

“Tancred has six galleys of mine,” offered Johanna. “You can give them to Philip if you like as my contribution to your crusade.”

The mesh of Richard’s mail rustled pleasantly as he loped down from the window to hug her. Each was so easily bitten by the other’s ideas. “Heaven bless you for your generosity!” he cried, accepting eagerly. “And when am I to see Berengaria?”

“The moment you get rid of Ann,” she promised, hurrying him from her room so that she could get on with her preparations for a betrothal party. For what were the affairs of Philip Capet compared with the joy of bringing together the people she loved?

Richard, gathered up his gauntlets, stumbling over a silk-tasselled stool without so much as an oath. “How invaluable you would have been as my chancellor!” he said admiringly. But Johanna was already considering the size of her table and planning where everybody was to sit. “Well, my dear,” she answered, with the abstracted forthrightness of her mother, “
somebody
has to be the brains of the family now Henry is gone.”

Pausing without resentment on the threshold, Richard carefully reassembled the wreckage of her door. “I forgot to say that your amorous dragon is now bound and the castle all yours,” he announced formally. “I shall be proud if you will come down and entertain our allies?”

But poor Johanna had had her fill of foreign kings. She shook her head, laughing. “It is more homely up here, and I can see your splendid ships. We are going to dine up here privately—all of us— instead of down in the hall.” She wouldn’t ask for Robin by name. She felt sure that immediately he had finished all the aide-de-camp jobs he always did so efficiently for her brother he would come. She kept the thought of it, warm and unexplored, in the background of her mind—the way a woman keeps a long-looked-for letter until her household tasks are done. And because happiness always killed her resentments, she added, “Thank you about the dragon. But don’t twist his tail too hard!” Then, remembering a dozen things she wanted done, she hurried out to the stairhead. “Richard! Richard!” she called down after him. “Could you possibly spare me Blondel?”

His head was still visible like a torch in the curved darkness, and as he turned the newel he grinned up at her indulgently. “You know very well he is your devoted slave!” he called back.

Just to hear him bellowing for Blondel as he clanked down the stairs was almost as good as being back at Oxford. Johanna bustled back into the room of her captivity, singing. Instead of presiding over one of Tancred’s fantastic feasts in the hall, she was going to give a private Plantagenet party.

When Blondel presented himself in the Queen of Sicily’s ill-used doorway she stared at him for an uncertain moment across the roses she was arranging, trying to reconcile this grave young man with the engaging lad she remembered. The dreams that used to lurk behind his long lashes seemed to be hidden by a hard-won air of efficiency, and a business-like Norman crop had superseded his thick, page’s bob. “Why, Blondel,” she exclaimed, “you look so
capable
! Don’t you make verses any more?”

But the way he kneeled to kiss her hands seemed to give her back the whole of England. As she touched his shoulders, an exasperating mist of tears made his bent head just a blur. It was as if she touched Henry and Hodierna—the carved lions on her father’s chair or his favourite wolfhound—the tower room, the sunny tiltyard, and the willows dipping green fingers in the placid Thames. All the things of their old, familiar life. “We were all so happy together—at home—quarrelling—” she said incoherently.

Blondel got up. He was not much taller than she. They stood smiling at each other, level-eyed. “It was so dull after you went,” he told her inadequately.

Johanna laughed, turning back to the silver bowl she was filling. “And how is Hodierna?” she asked.

“She isn’t there any more,” he answered, after a moment’s hesitation.

“But Oxford without Hodierna is unthinkable!” As he made no comment, Johanna asked sharply, “She isn’t ill, is she?” Her concern for the beloved curse was as real as if she herself had left there only yesterday.

“Oh, no, Madam.” Blondel saw the next question framing itself inevitably on her lips. His sensitive mind realised that it must have been in her heart at the nostalgic moment of their greeting.

“And—and Robin?” asked Johanna, carefully selecting a tall red rose.

Dumb with consternation, the King’s squire stooped to retrieve her scissors. He—who was never clumsy—fumbled to gain time, recalling John’s vivid picture of their parting in the herb garden. Not that John’s pictures were always accurate, of course… “Perhaps, Madam, you had better ask the King,” he said, hating the stiff sound of his words.

He heard the tall stem snap between her fingers. But by the time he had straightened himself it had been thrust firmly into place—like her burning curiosity. Being the daughter of a great house, Johanna had learned young how to cloak her own vulnerable humanity with gracious enquiries into the concerns of others. “When you came to us as a page you little thought you would so soon be serving a king, did you?” she asked.

“It’s like being part of one of those splendid old tapestries about adventures—working for him,” grinned Blondel.

“Then there’s a very happy episode you can act in to-day,” she laughed. She called one of the bustling servants to set the bowl in the middle of the table. Richard and Sholto had both told her that Berengaria loved flowers—and what Berengaria loved was going to matter very much from now on. Even Queen Eleanor would have to take second place. Johanna sighed, wiped her fingers on fringed damask, and went briskly to the window. “Come and look down, Blondel,” she invited, pointing out a dilapidated hut where an old man sat mending his nets. “Nobody would believe I had smuggled two ladies in there last night, would they?”

But Blondel had reason to believe her capable of any hare-brained scheme. “Is that why the old fisherman is blocking up the entrance with his nets?” he enquired.

“And why you, my gallant Blondel, must go down quickly and discreetly to rescue them from such bare entertainment.” She picked up a cloak of her own and bundled it into his arms. “Here, take this and wrap it round the younger one,” she said, “and—whatever you do—don’t go through the hall. You can bring them up by the postern turret and then we must feed them here.”

Blondel viewed the fruit dishes and flowers with fresh understanding, and so willing was he to further even her wildest inventions that he found himself half way to the door with the cloak neatly folded over his arm before his quick brain had foreseen a possible difficulty. “Suppose they distrust a stranger and refuse to come?” he suggested.

Johanna smiled down at him from the window step, her hands folded smugly in the sleeves of her
bliaut.
Such service was very gratifying after the careless procrastination of the Sicilians. “They will not hesitate for a moment,” she reassured him. “You see, both of them have met you before and one of them is the Queen of England.”

Having trained himself to be a sort of human buffer between the family and discomfort, Blondel was badly jarred. “Our Queen! Waiting in that deplorable hovel!” he exclaimed. Like the rest of them he adored Eleanor, and trailed after her with things she had mislaid and tried to protect her from the importunities of people to whom she had been kind.

“I am sure she would wait down in one of the dungeons quite cheerfully if she thought it would profit your master,” Johanna assured him. “And I suppose it is fine of the other one,” she added, with reluctant generosity—“crossing Europe without ceremony like this—”

Light dawned on Blondel. “You say I have seen her, madam,” he repeated eagerly. “May one hazard a guess at her name?”

“Hazard anything you like—except a chance encounter with the King of France!” laughed Johanna, speeding him gaily on his errand.

But when he was gone her mood changed. She turned back to the window, wondering anxiously what Berengaria would be like. She saw Blondel emerge from the postern gate, cross the sands, and slip something into the hand of the old fisherman, who moved his cumbersome nets aside; and presently the little party was picking its way over the rocks towards the castle. No hood ever woven could have disguised the tall, unconcerned dignity of Eleanor—one might as well try to bring in the archangel Gabriel unnoticed, thought her daughter, with a smile. The shorter one, closely enveloped in the fur-lined cloak, must be Berengaria; and the girl with the honey-coloured hair one of her ladies. How beautifully Blondel was helping them over the slippery pools! Once he picked up the little honey-coloured wench bodily and set her down on the other side.

As the four tiny figures grew more foreshortened beneath the walls, Johanna turned back into the room and snatched up a plate. As she peered anxiously into its silver surface she thought, with self-disparagement, “I wonder if she is as lovely as they say? And much more lovely than I?”—forgetting that an ill-reflected Johanna, without colour or animation, was no Johanna at all. But before she could lament for long over the comparison her party was upon her. Her mother and Berengaria and the pleasantly rounded little blonde. Queen Eleanor’s hair was a little whiter, perhaps, but by her very erectness scorned the twinges of rheumatism which had driven her to accept Blondel’s watchful assistance on the last few turns of the stair. And even a shapeless, borrowed cloak could not hide the perfection of Berengaria’s beauty. It was like a fine etching in sepia tinted with the warmth of southern roses.

So much Johanna saw before she and her mother were clinging to each other with the joy of family reunion, which always used to seem so bourgeois to Ann, but which looked so lovable to Berengaria. “My dear, if only you could have come home before your father died! He lost all of you at the last,” Eleanor was saying, half her thoughts still with her faithless husband who had suffered so from John’s ingratitude. “Your fisherfolk were dears,” she announced in the next breath. “But their hut was full of fleas!”

How good it was to hear again the mellow comfort of her voice and to giggle over the inimitable way in which she always repudiated her emotions with a brisk commonplace! “Forgive me—both of you—for keeping you down there,” apologized Johanna, disengaging herself breathlessly. “But Philip was here—”

Having got herself divorced from his father before he was even thought of, Eleanor was not likely to be much impressed either by his new importance or by his matrimonial ambitions for his sister. “Philip or no Philip, I should have come up to the castle,” she declared, drawing Berengaria to her side. “But these two fainthearts began shuddering when all the carnage started, and I must say Richard made a spectacular job of it. This is Berengaria, Johanna.”

Johanna turned with outstretched hands. “You must be very tired,” she said politely.

“Not too tired to appreciate your kindness in sending for me.” Berengaria’s voice was low and pleasant, her French quaintly softened by a southern accent.

The fair girl who had accompanied her lifted the cloak from her mistress’s shoulders as if she were unveiling a miniature Venus, and Blondel brought a basin of scented water. Berengaria dipped her exquisite fingers while Eleanor frankly wallowed. “I expect we both smell of fish,” she said, tucking back her crisp, windswept curls beneath a snowy coif.

Berengaria looked up across the basin at Johanna and smiled. Like most people who do not smile over-readily among strangers, she disarmed them when she did so. Johanna knew at once that, although this exquisite creature was accustomed to facing crowds with composure, she had shared her own shyness in anticipation of their meeting.

“Then you didn’t mind the fish or the fleas?” Johanna found herself asking.

“Either your mother exaggerates or I must have been thinking of Richard,” laughed Berengaria, shaking out her crumpled dress.

“I can lend you a fresh one,” offered Johanna, suddenly wanting her to be as beautiful as possible for him. “But I suppose it wouldn’t fit and—frankly—I haven’t anything half as attractive.”

“It is kind of you, but Yvette will see to it for me,” said Berengaria, introducing the girl. “She is the youngest of my ladies.”

“And the nicest, I should think,” added Eleanor, touching Yvette’s wild rose cheek with an approving finger.

Blondel, helping to brush the dust from Berengaria’s skirts, seemed to think so too. And standing patiently between them, Berengaria looked over their busily bent heads to the wonderful panorama of blue and white beyond the bay. “How beautiful!” she murmured, with no word at all about having been hustled in without ceremony by the back stairs.

So she wasn’t just a spoiled, sophisticated beauty after all, nor the carping sort of person who would crab all their pleasures as Ann had done. “Then you won’t mind dining up here instead of in the hall?” asked Johanna, eagerly. “I thought it would be a pleasure for you and Richard—for all of us—to meet without a crowd of staring people. Would you mind if we don’t even have the servants?”

“Lovely!” murmured Berengaria, who had never dined really
en famille
in all her pampered life.

Yvette took up the idea at once. “I could help, Madam, perhaps?” she suggested, seeking guidance from the elderly Queen who had directed them so expertly through divers foreign ways.

“You must be hungry yourself, child,” demurred Eleanor. For was not a girl who had been brought up by her own kinswoman, the Abbess of Fontevrault, fit to sit at meat with the highest in the land?

But sentimental Yvette wanted to help with the betrothal party. “I can eat afterwards,” she insisted, looking round in a lost sort of way for some less private apartment. Fishing boats, back entrances, kings and queens more or less picnicking on the third floor—it was all so different from anything she had hitherto experienced in her carefully ordered life. Blondel came to her rescue immediately. “Perhaps Mademoiselle will join me in the hall after we have finished serving here?”

Turning from the happiness of their glowing youth, Berengaria touched Johanna’s mourning with a little gesture of compassion. “Everyone in Italy is so full of Tancred’s romantic behaviour that it is difficult to think of you as recently widowed,” she said gently.

“It seems only the other day I was trying to tell her that she was to marry William,” sighed Eleanor.

“Was he so very old?” asked Berengaria, thrilling secretly at the thought of Richard’s virility.

“Much older than Tancred—and ill,” Johanna told her.

“How cheated you must have felt—you who seem so full of life!”

Johanna was silent, touched by her understanding. Then she remembered her laden table. “Let us sit down,” she invited. “You must both be famished. We won’t wait for the others.”

Smiling her thanks as Blondel set her chair, Berengaria noticed that five places were laid. “Who else?” she asked.

“Richard and his foster-brother,” said Johanna, her hazel-green eyes bright with happiness.

“Ah, yes, of course, I remember. Ro—bin.” The ordinary English name acquired an exciting strangeness from her Spanish tongue. Whereas Johanna merely sat down, Sancho’s daughter had an enviable trick of sinking into a chair surrounded by gracefully spread skirts that lent her littleness unbelievable dignity. “Richard used to talk by the hour about his precious foster-brother,” she explained. “He said I was like him.”

“Like him?” repeated Johanna, seeing nothing comparable between her guest’s soft perfection and the resilient strength of Robin.

“Oh, I don’t mean in looks!” laughed Berengaria. And, seeing that they were served, Johanna settled herself for a good gossip. “What’s this about Hodierna having left Oxford, Mother?” she asked.

“Has she? It’s news to me, and I left only a few weeks ago.” Eleanor looked up anxiously at Blondel, who was handing her a dish of stuffed olives. “I hope she isn’t ill?”

“No, Madam,” replied Blondel, signing to Yvette to refill the silver-mounted drinking horns.

All this sea air had given Eleanor an appetite, and it was good to sit down to a properly cooked meal in a civilized room again. “Perhaps she has gone on a visit or to see poor Becket’s shrine,” she suggested comfortably. “We must ask Richard.”

“Will he come soon?” asked Berengaria, her gaze never far from the door.

Johanna’s heart was hurrying to the same question, but she had the misfortune to sit facing the window and her mother was complaining—not without reason considering how far she had travelled to fetch him a bride—that Richard ought to have been there to receive them. “It’s so like all the boys,” she said, insisting upon Yvette pouring herself a glass of wine. “Always remembering something they simply must do just when it’s time for a meal!”