The Passionate Brood (16 page)

“What’s it like?” demanded Lusignon.

“Well, it’s mounted on the usual kind of wooden platform on rollers.”

“They waste too much time where you have to bridge or fill in a moat,” objected Chalus.

“No need to do either,” said Richard, too carried away by his subject this time to resent the interruption. “This model of mine has sufficient resilience to sling stones from the
far
side of the widest moat into the best battlemented bailey ever built. By means of a heavy beam twisted so tightly between two sets of ropes that it generates a tremendous force—but I’ll show you. Mercadier has brought one ashore,”

He pushed back his chair, and they would have streamed out after him like hounds on a scent had not Berengaria caught at his arm. “Oh, Richard,” she protested, “not
to-night
!”

Richard smiled down at her. “I will come back soon, sweet. But de Lusignon knows the actual walls of Jerusalem and can give me expert advice—”

“Once he’s got somebody worked up about his old war machines he’ll probably forget to come back at all!” warned Johanna.

So Berengaria was firm. “No, Richard. You’ve fought ever since we landed. Yesterday you were travelling down from the mountains, and last night you sat up arranging all this.” She waved regretfully towards the remains of the iced castles and all that was left of her banquet. “It was so beautiful,” she sighed. “But what was the good of it if you’ve forgotten so soon that we are married?”

Everybody laughed and the eager youngsters tried to look as if they didn’t mind her breaking in upon their apprenticeship to fame. Richard put an arm round her and said she was perfectly right. He even seemed to enjoy the novelty of giving up his bachelor freedom. He had not yet learned that marriage, unlike his casual loves, could clash with his career.

Perceiving that the party was over, their guests began to drift tactfully away. The King of Jerusalem kissed Berengaria’s hand. “We must see your stone-slinger in the morning,” he called to Richard, “and wish you an envious good night.”

Johanna kissed her new sister-in-law on both cheeks. “May you always get your own way as easily!” she whispered.

Yvette ran on ahead to put out her mistress’s night wrap and Blondel shouted to the Comnenos’ major-domo for torches to light the bride to bed. Richard lingered over a last drink with his sister and Raymond, talking over old times.

“D’you remember that awful night at Oxford when it all came out about Ann and I tried to teach you to dance?” asked Johanna. “And Henry teased you about Sancho’s sister? And you said, ‘God help me, shall I have to dance with
her
!”

“He didn’t need to dance,” recalled Raymond, wishing himself tall and carelessly attractive.

“Funny!” mused Richard, setting down his empty cup. “If it hadn’t been for Ann I should never have gone to Navarre!”

When his shadow had passed out of sight on the curved wall of the stair Johanna looked round at the disordered hall and sighed.

“Come out into the garden,” suggested Raymond. “There is nothing so depressing as the dregs of a party.”

“Except the dregs of one’s life,” said Johanna. As she passed out into the garden she thought of the mockery of her own marriage. Of William’s consideration and his impotence. She brushed roughly past a trailing vine, hating its exotic beauty because her heart was hungry for green hills and the deep, dappled shade of beech trees. “Robin—Robin—” cried the ghost of her happy childhood. She could almost feel the wind in her hair, hear the scuffle of her flying feet searching for him around the battlements. But Isaac’s garden was heavy with the scent of spices, and the only sounds were the splashing of his fountain and the distant sweetness of some shepherd’s pipe. “What a night for love!” she murmured, glancing up at the landward tower where a light still shone from Berengaria’s window.

Most men as much in love as Raymond would have taken up the challenge of her words. But his long friendship with his cousin had made him wise and patient with a woman’s moods. He stood in the shadow of a cypress tree worshipping the clear-cut fairness of Johanna’s upturned face. “There will be plenty of other magic nights,” he said, without touching her. “And if I wait long enough, please God, one of them may be ours.”

Am I forgiven about the war’ conference?” enquired Richard, grinning down at Berengaria from the doorway of their bridal chamber.

Seeing him there, Berengaria’s heart missed a beat.

“I wish I were more like Johanna,” she sighed, realising that she had married the kind of man women always
do
forgive. “She adores all this military excitement. But then, of course, she’s so like you. Your minds are brave and spacious, and I’m such a home-loving creature!”

She looked anything but homely in the silver lamé wrap Yvette was fastening, and, as always, Richard’s pulses quickened at sight of her. “Just the sort of wife a soldier wants as an antidote to war!” he laughed, leaning against the wide, open fireplace. Even in May this southern bride of his liked a fire, and the flickering light behind him made a wavy silhouette of his long limbs. He glanced round at the rich Byzantine furnishings with faint disapproval. “You do realise, don’t you, that all the home we shall have for months will be a captured fortress or a camp? Shall you mind very much?”

Berengaria sat down on the end of the low, wide bed and said firmly, “I must get used to it.” But she was secretly dismayed by the prospect and, as if determined to cling to the amenities of civilised life until the last possible moment, she picked up her jewelled toilet box and asked Yvette to brush her hair.

“Have you a headache after all that ceremonial pother?” asked Richard. He came and lifted the gold circlet from her forehead and pulled up a stool beside her. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get you a better crown,” he said, twirling Chalus’s circlet between his knees. “I shall have to make up for it with a grand coronation for the benefit of my Saxons.”

He was so dear and unemotional and natural, making it easier for her to get used to having him wandering about her bedroom. “Tell us about England,” she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling with shy awareness of their thrilling new intimacy, “Yvette used to believe that curious legend that all the men had long tails!”

Her youngest lady laid down her brush protestingly. “Oh, Madam, I was quite a child then!”

“You are not much more now, are you?” teased Richard. “And, anyway, you’ve got it all wrong, Yvette. What most of us islanders suffer from is short tempers. And sometimes they hurt damnably.” He sat staring into the fire while she put away the stately wedding dress and turned down the bedcover which Eleanor had embroidered and brought from England.

“I think I must have read everything ever written about your island and driven people crazy asking questions about it,” Berengaria was saying. “So I don’t imagine I shall feel strange.” By a process of wishful thinking she skipped the months when he would be fighting his precious crusade and thought only of the time when they would be living in what Yvette called “a proper country” again. “After all, I already know most of your family.”

“Except John and—Arthur,” agreed Richard.

Berengaria guessed that the second name was only a substitute. She always knew when he was brooding about Robin, and now it occurred to her that he must have been wishing him there all day just as she had wanted her parents. She would have liked to comfort him, but somehow did not dare. She thanked Yvette a little absently and bade her good night.

“Good night, Madam—and Sir,” added Yvette, not quite sure whether she ought to curtsey twice.

Richard swung round on his stool. Her naïveté never failed to amuse him. “Come here, Yvette,” he said, feeling in the wallet of his belt for a string of quaintly carved beads he had chosen specially for her. “I want you to wear these for taking such good care of my bride. I shall tell King Sancho you are worth all the staid old court dowagers he could have sent.”

“Oh, Sir!” gasped Yvette, breathless with delight.

“Blue as your eyes!” he said, getting up to fasten the beads himself. “And now go and tell Blondel I shan’t want him any more to-night, and when he sees how pretty you look I expect he’ll want to sing you that absurdly sentimental song all over again!”

“Oh, Richard, why put such ideas into the girl’s head?” laughed Berengaria, when the door had closed behind her excited flurry of thanks.

“For my romantic young squire to make them sprout, my dear. You don’t want her to mope in the Holy Land, do you?” He came and lifted the thick waves of her hair, letting them run like a silken ribbon over his hands. “Beloved, I’ve never seen you with it loose before. It’s like a lovely sable cloak.”

“What is John like? And who is Arthur?” she asked hurriedly, seeing that they were alone.

“John? Oh, the same as most spoiled youngest sons, I suppose,” answered Richard, jerking a cushion to the floor at her feet and resting his head against her knee. “And young Arthur is my nephew. You’ll like him, Berengaria. His father, Geoffrey, was the one who married Constance of Brittany and got killed in a tournament, you remember? He came between my other two sisters and Johanna, so Arthur is my heir.” He reached up for one of her hands and kissed the small, soft palm. “Until we have sons of our own, witch woman.”

Berengaria leaned her cheek against the top of his head, building homely castles in the fire. “I hope they will all have auburn hair,” she said softly. “And I want a daughter as vital as Johanna. Do you think the English will like me, Richard?”

“How could they help it, sweetheart? Haven’t all my family fallen in love with you? And the young pups of pages and the tough archers and even the King of Jerusalem himself? And isn’t that swine Chalus ready to stab me any dark night?” Richard twisted himself round until his arms were about her waist. In the shifting firelight he seemed as young and eager as the day he first loved her in Navarre. It was as if he had shed the years of ugly fighting against his father and brothers—the months of responsibility and kinghood. “You look like a little silver statue—sitting so up right—on that great bed,” he said unsteadily. His eyes were warm with passion, his lips demanding. “I’ve waited such years—wanting you …”

Suddenly they were clinging to each other, laughing between their kisses.

“To think that I might have married Ann!”

“And that I might have let them give me to Philip or someone…And never known that marriage could be like this. It has been unendurable, this waiting—”

But Berengaria held him off a little longer, knowing intuitively that once she had given him everything he would never be so utterly hers again. “Tell me some more about our next coronation,” she coaxed. “We’ve had so little time to talk about our own affairs.”

Richard obeyed reluctantly, settling his head more comfortably against her knee. “The men will shout themselves hoarse, I suppose, because you are beautiful.” He began intoning the words as if they were a rather boring sort of saga. “And the women will bring you their troubles because you are kind—”

“And the children?” asked Berengaria, bending to smooth out the cross lines from his firm, freshly shaven face.

He looked up and laughed immediately. “Oh, they will strew flowers before your feet because they are adorable anyhow.”

“I shall like that.”

“And we shall go in a state barge to Westminster,” he went on, warming to his theme.

“What is this West-min-stair?” interrupted Berengaria, wanting to picture it all just as he did.

“Just a little riverside village near London. Not big like Paris or Pamplona. But Edward the Confessor built an abbey there. The man who willed his Saxon crown away to my grandfather, you know.”

“Or William of Normandy
said
he did,” corrected Berengaria, whose history lessons had been less biased.

“Well, anyhow, it’s a beautiful abbey. I shall be insuperably proud when you walk up that exquisite nave with the priests chanting at the High Altar and all the people cheering and the bells ringing.”

Berengaria shifted his head from her lap and stood up. Through the open window she could see her honeymoon island sleeping under the stars. Only the shepherds seemed to be awake, huddled over little wood fires in the fields beyond the land gate. The call of their reed pipes came softly through the scented night. “But in our hearts we shall both be thinking of Cyprus,” she said.

“Our private lives which we have managed to keep for each other after all.” With one of those lithe movements so surprising in a man of his height, Richard was beside her.

She turned in glad surprise. “You remember my saying that?”

“I remember everything,” he assured her.

“My telling you that it didn’t matter whom I married? That we were just political puppets. And my bitterness. After I had met
you—
” Because they were so crazily in love it mattered supremely that he should share the memory of its beginning.

Richard shook her gently. “Didn’t I tell you, despondent woman, that there would be some decent princes—like me?”

“I admired your modesty, of course,” laughed Berengaria, her voice low with happiness. “But I never really believed I should get one.” From the lovely security of his arm she watched the leaping flames light up the emblems of England and Navarre on the coverlet of the bed. Richard’s blood-red leopards and her own silver hearts and stag. Somehow Eleanor’s embroidery seemed to make a reality of their love affair, turning it into the accomplished union of two great dynasties, whose offspring might write their deeds across the face of Europe. It seemed to weight the rapture of their love with responsibility—to make it less their own—and for a moment Berengaria was afraid.

But Richard caught her to his heart. “Do you believe now—and now?” he demanded exultantly, between the passion of his kisses.

“I believe in the goodness of God!” breathed Berengaria, yielding to the urgency she loved. “And to think that the poor scriveners of history will coldly record that in eleven-ninety-one Richard I of England married Berengaria of Navarre!”

But Richard was scarcely listening or heard only the beat of his own blood. He reached up and threw the last torch to the hearth. It hissed into the heart of the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. By their light he unfastened the silver lamé wrap and Berengaria smiled up at him from the sable mantle of her hair. “God’s heart, how beautiful you are!” he cried, lifting her in his strong arms to her lawful place upon the Plantagenet bed.