The Passionate Brood (13 page)

“I’m afraid it’s
my
fault this time, sweet,” confessed Johanna. “You see, I wanted to have you both here as a surprise for him. So I reminded him of an urgent debt he had to pay Philip.”

“More expensive war equipment, I suppose,” sighed Eleanor, who had been talked out of a good deal of her best jewellery for this crusade.

“Well, no,” admitted Johanna. “Just something he didn’t want.”

Her mother gave a dubious little grunt. “It doesn’t sound much like a son of mine—paying good money for something he doesn’t want.”

“But then, you see,” went on Johanna, involving herself still further, “it wasn’t
his
money.”

Berengaria laid down knife and napkin with a little spurt of laughter. “You are a crazy family, aren’t you? In Navarre we have a saying, ‘As mad as a Plant—’ But she didn’t finish what she was going to say. She just rose slowly from her chair as if she were welcoming the whole host of Heaven. Her pansy brown eyes went wide and all the roses of Navarre seemed to warm the creamy pallor of her skin. “Richard!” she cried softly.

There was a sudden stir outside the Queen of Sicily’s door. Servants scuttled out of the way, holding dishes at impossible angles as they squeezed themselves against stone walls to let the Angevin invader pass. They gazed at him with hatred and awe, for was it not common rumour in every Mediterranean port that he could kill a lion single-handed? But except for his height he didn’t look so terrible. He had bathed off the bloodstains of battle and was freshly shaven, pleased with himself and his world. Out of sheer good humour he paused on the top stair to pinch the ear of a pretty serving maid, and his laugh was good to hear as he recounted something sketchily over his shoulder to the companion who followed hard on his heels. “My dear fellow, he’d sell his soul for money,” Richard was insisting. “So I told him there were plenty of good nunneries for his sister—”

Their laughter and the firm tramp of their feet came nearer, obliterating the soft shuffling movements of the servants. But they both pulled up short under the spandrel of the doorway, seeing the three women sitting there in homely setting just as Johanna had planned.

“Mother! Berengaria! But this is magic!” exclaimed Richard.

“Johanna’s magic,” his mother reminded him. And Johanna turned swiftly to reap her reward. Her heart was hammering as it had never hammered for the amorous Tancred or for any other Sicilian, and her hands gripped the table edge behind her because she had not seen Robin for so long.

But the man Richard had brought with him was not Robin. Johanna saw a stocky man with a blunt nose and a large, humorous mouth. Although, like Richard, he had laid aside most of his war gear, it was easy to guess from his quiet, easy bearing that his shield would bear no insignificant device. All the same, Johanna hated him at sight. Not for any personal defect, but simply because he was not Robin.

How like a man to bring this stranger along, tying their tongues with politeness when everybody knew that she had planned a family party! Didn’t Richard ever
think
? Why, they might just as well have dined in hall and spared her mother the stairs!

Actually, Richard
had
thought—wretchedly and hurriedly in the midst of his own happiness. And knowing that she must be expecting Robin, it had seemed to him kinder to bring someone—anyone—rather than no one at all. So when he had had the pleasure of meeting a man he really liked among Philip’s supercilious followers he had brought him along as a sort of shield against Johanna’s wrath and his own unhealing loneliness.

“I thought you would be glad if I persuaded your cousin to sail with us, Berengaria,” he said, avoiding the furious questioning in Johanna’s eyes. “Mother, you remember Raymond of Toulouse?”

Eleanor cast her mind back to a time when she had almost despaired of ever having sons of her own. “He insisted upon showing me his toy horse while his father and a tedious procession of nobles were doing homage to Louis,” she managed to recall. “It was a ferocious-looking quadruped, I remember, and helped to enliven the ceremony considerably.”

Raymond laughed and kissed her hand. “And I was taken home babbling about ‘the lovely lady’ who had kept me quiet with sweetmeats,” he recalled.

“Yet I had to drag him here to dine,” complained Richard.

“At least he had that much sense!” thought Johanna, going through the paces of a hostess without enthusiasm.

“I understood it was a family affair,” explained Raymond. And even while he greeted his cousin his brown eyes begged for some sign of welcome from this golden girl who was so ridiculously like Richard.

“All the more reason why Berengaria’s family should be represented too,” said Eleanor, who could always be depended upon to put people at ease. “What a happy thought, Richard!”

Berengaria loved him for it. None of them would ever know what it had cost her to leave Sholto and her adoring parents and the cultured pleasantness of her home. Johanna’s compensating love of adventure was not hers, and from all she had heard of these Plantagenets they would not understand how one could cherish a smoothly flowing family life, unbroken by passionate incident or harsh word. Her hands clung to Raymond’s arm, pulling him down to the form beside her. He was a bit of home. And of late Raymond had managed to content himself with the knowledge that he could never hope to be more. But he felt a fool because Richard’s sister, whose party it was, sat down at the other end of the form with scarcely a word.

Richard himself was too excited to notice. “I just can’t believe it’s true!” he kept saying, still standing just inside the door, looking from one to another of his womenfolk. “An hour ago I believed you two were in Brindisi.”

“We got tired of waiting,” Berengaria told him demurely. Her adoring eyes must have told him much more, for, with a low laugh, he was across the room and had her in his arms with her little pointed chin cupped in his hand. “You’re even more beautiful than I remembered,” he was saying, his eyes devouring her before them all.

Eleanor leaned forward to smile at Raymond across their unresponsive hostess. “Oughtn’t we to go and look at the ships or something?” she suggested, mocking gamely at the loss of her maternal empire. But Richard overheard her and, swinging on his heel, pushed her gently back into her chair. “Do you think I would let you go now when you have been wonderful enough to bring her?” he asked, his tanned cheek resting for a moment against her silvery hair. He slipped into the seat between them and helped himself lavishly to all his favourite dishes at once. And presently—under cover of the general conversation—he produced the wreckage of a rose and placed it carefully beside Berengaria’s plate.

“Oh—you’ve kept it all this time!” she murmured, covering it quickly with her hand.

Richard was thrilled to find he could call the red into her cheeks so easily. In Pamplona it had been he who was confused and she who had laughed. But now, with senses stormed by the unabashed ardour of his full manhood, she was no longer entirely mistress of the situation.

Still watching her with tender amusement, Richard forced open her predatory fingers one by one and took back his cherished tournament favour. As he thrust the withered petals back against his heart, the warmth of his flesh revived some of their faded fragrance, wafting to his nostrils the heady intoxication of his first awakening passion for her. “Until I hold you there,” he whispered, his eyes burning her.

And all the while Johanna sat dumbly surmising, hospitality forgotten and food untouched. She saw the four of them as a complete and pleasant square from which her uncertainty excluded her. Suddenly she could bear it no longer. “Isn’t Robin coming?” her clear voice demanded stridently across their happiness.

They lifted startled heads from the absorbing topics of reunion. “No,” barked Richard, almost rudely.

His mother and Raymond left the reputation of a mutual friend hanging scandalously in mid-air. “You mean—not coming at all?” Eleanor asked incredulously. She too had always taken it for granted that love necessarily included understanding, and this had been her undoing with Henry of Anjou.

For the first time since they had sat down Johanna’s attitude became less rigid and withdrawn. “Oh, Richard,” she said, letting her upturned palm fall pleadingly across the table, “you haven’t quarrelled with
him,
have you?”

“He thinks we’re a lot of bloody foreigners!” he muttered, shamefacedly.

Eleanor’s wise old eyes searched his face. It had always been an open book to her in which both good and bad intent were underlined as uncompromisingly as the important words in her letters. And this in spite of her almost idolatrous love for him. “My poor Hodierna, who loves you both!” was all she said.

“Hodierna could have stayed at Oxford,” he said. “She chose to follow him.”

“Where?” demanded Johanna.

Richard shrugged with an exaggerated assumption of indifference—a nasty, Gallic gesture he had caught from Philip. “How should I know? Except that he stayed in England,” he answered stubbornly. “He traded on my love—letting me down and then criticizing everything I did. So I outlawed him.”

Both the Plantagenet women smothered a cry. Eleanor sat unconscious of a hand that still covered her parted lips, watching Johanna’s overturned wine spread like a bleeding wound across the cloth. Johanna pushed back the form she had been sharing with her unwanted guest. In so doing she caught the end of her sleeve clumsily on one of the jewels studding his sword belt, and when he bent to unravel it she tugged it blindly from his grasp, scarcely aware of his courtesy. “How could you? Oh, how could you? I must send him a message—somehow—” she cried incoherently, turning away to hide her distress.

To hide how much he cared, Richard laughed boisterously. “Better send him your distaff!” he scoffed, washing down his food with Tancred’s choicest wine.

Johanna swung round on him like an angry, spitting cat; but Eleanor lifted a restraining hand. She was very angry with him herself. “Richard, that is unworthy of you!” she said quietly.

He knew that it was, but no man enjoys being reproved before his future wife. And here was the inescapable memory of Robin making a churl of him again and spoiling all his best moments. “Well, if he didn’t want to come with
me
at least he might have changed his mind if he heard we were sailing for Sicily,” he said sullenly. What he implied in self-defence was scarcely true, because probably Robin hadn’t heard until after they had sailed. “But that was no fault of mine,” thought Richard, reliving that hellish night when he had combed the Kentish woods so ineffectually. And anyhow, he felt, it was illogical of Johanna to blame him instead of Robin. But there she stood with her back to them, staring unseeingly at his beautiful ships and tearing her silk headdress to shreds in a miniature edition of his own Angevin rage. Except that being a woman and a hostess cramped her style a bit, he supposed, with brotherly satisfaction.

Blondel and Yvette had slipped away so tactfully that no one had noticed the moment of their going, and the Count of Toulouse got up and moved nearer to his cousin. Loves and loyalties, rancours and shifting passions incomprehensible to either of them had been tossed about familiarly as shuttlecocks. To understand them, Raymond supposed, one must be born in the bosom of this charming, turbulent family—which, thank Heaven, he was not! “Everything they do turns to drama,” he said under his breath, and Berengaria felt she must somehow ward off this strange destiny to which she would so soon be joined. She had never seen this Robin about whom they were all wrangling, but she knew how Richard loved him, and palpably he had power to move them all. She looked down at the clenched fist lying on the table beside her and ran a tentative finger down the back of it, smoothing the strong reddish hairs. “Didn’t you say, Richard—that day at the tournament—that there are two sorts of courage?” she reminded him.

Richard turned at the touch of her hand, but it was quite clear from his blank stare that for the moment he had forgotten she was there. Although he was hers there would often be moments when, like Ann, she would be made to feel an outsider. But—unlike Ann—she would always have power to reclaim him with a touch. His hand closed over hers now, and he smiled down at her reassuringly. “I am sorry, Johanna,” he apologised at once. “I spoke like a fool—because I was hurt—forgetting that you loved him too.”

If the words elucidated things a little for Raymond, somehow they jarred him badly. He had thought of Johanna as someone coming through widowhood into untrammelled freedom. She had stood apart, battling with disappointment and hurt pride, and it was her turn for play-acting now. “I was rather young then, wasn’t I?” she said negligently. Stepping down from the window embrasure, she flicked her skirts at a grey Persian kitten Tancred had sent her and laughed when it bounced after her along the floor. And just to show them that there were other men in the world besides Robin, she sat down next to Raymond and began deliberately trying to attract him. She appeared to have forgotten that he had come uninvited to her party and she neither knew nor cared that he was far too fine to endure being made use of.

Richard accepted her attitude with relief. “And what about you, Mother? Are you coming on with us to look up all those Syrian lovers of yours whom old Louis waxed so jealous about? Just to show Raymond he’s not the only old campaigner present.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Richard!” laughed Eleanor. “You know very well if Henry had lived to run this crusade with you instead of Philip he wouldn’t have allowed any women at all. But if you can’t do without them”—she moved aside a spray of roses in order to nod pleasantly to her future daughter-in-law—“well, at least let them be young and beautiful.” The gallant old Queen sighed, remembering perhaps what fun she had had at Antioch; then added briskly, “Besides, I had better go back and keep an eye on things in England.”

Richard got up and rinsed his fingers, drying them thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should have been wiser to send you officially as my regent,” he said.

But Eleanor’s eyes twinkled. She knew how the irascible little Longchamps would resent such an appointment. “I will just go back as the besotted old watchdog I’ve been for you ever since you were breeched,” she decided.

“But I thought you had another son to keep an eye on England, Madam?” said Raymond, politely extricating himself from Johanna’s embarrassing attentions.

“That’s just why,” they told him cryptically.

He shrugged helplessly. “Mad—quite mad!” he murmured, catching Berengaria’s amused glance.

Richard clapped him on the shoulder and invited Berengaria to come and look once more at his wonderful ships. She loved the way they sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, painting deep purple shadows on the water; but they meant nothing to her, rope by rope, as they did to the understanding of the island-bred Johanna. Secretly, she wished she could be done with ships and spend her honeymoon peacefully on dry land. But at least they were bigger than the uncomfortable little fishing boat and no one, she supposed optimistically, could be sick or frightened with Richard on board.