The Passionate Brood (22 page)

Berengaria sighed with relief. He was quite mad, of course—but at least it wasn’t Ida. “And do you suppose anyone who has ever seen you would mistake you for a pilgrim?” she asked indulgently.

“Why ever not?”

She looked him over with affectionate amusement. “Well, your height for one thing—and your hair and your incurable swagger.”

Momentarily dashed, Richard scratched at his scrubby beard. “I could wear sandals and one of those hideous shovel hats,” he suggested doubtfully.

His wife laughed undutifully in his face. He was so dear and irresponsible in this off-duty sort of mood. “You’re supposed to be a king—not part of a travelling show,” she told him. “And, anyhow, you can’t go meandering across Europe now there’s all this fresh trouble in England.” She could have bitten off her tongue the moment the words had slipped out.

Richard sat up, crusades and pilgrimages forgotten. “What trouble?” he demanded. “Why wasn’t I told?”

He was suddenly quite a different person, and it took all Beren-garia’s inherent dignity not to be afraid of him. “I wouldn’t let them worry you,” she admitted, “but Blondel was stopped in the street by a Jew on his way to sell jewels in Basra. He recognised Blondel as having been with you in Dover, and told him that it was common knowledge in Kent that the Queen’s letters to you had been seized, so he thought you ought to know that your brother has turned that Angevin bishop—William of Some-where-or-other—out of his chancellorship.”

Richard tried too late to strangle the coarsest of his guardroom paths. “Go on, what else?” he asked grimly.

“He said John had seized a lot more castles and that he and the barons were on the brink of civil war. Of course,” added Berengaria, conscientiously, “he was only a Jew.”

But, like most royal personages, Richard had a remarkably good memory. He had a very clear picture in his mind of the only Jewish jewel merchant he had met in Dover, of his dignity and the arresting way in which he had spoken about the gratitude of his race. Gratitude to Robin, really. So Richard had no doubts about the authenticity of the message. England really
was
bleeding for this crusade, and suddenly Jerusalem didn’t seem to matter so much. Yet he blamed himself rather than John. “God’s teeth, what a fool I was to trust him!” he cried bitterly. Robin had been right…about that too.

Berengaria had that quality—rare in a woman—of letting people follow their train of thought to its conclusion. She made neither comment nor suggestion until her husband had had time to assimilate her news. “If there is going to be trouble of that sort,” he decided, “I can’t have you landing until I come. Raymond had better take you and Johanna and Yvette to Rome, and you can wait for me to join you overland. Then when Mercadier has cleared up everything here he can call for us with the fleet and we can all go home together. You’d like that, ’Garia?”

Berengaria was amazed that he should still contemplate going on with his money-raising project. “I think you ought to go home at once,” she said.

“Now you are talking like Robin,” he said irritably.

“It’s because we both love you,” she smiled. “Of course, Johanna does too—and Raymond. But they’re so bemused by your military glory that they don’t notice you’re being a very bad king.” Berengaria broke off with a vexed little laugh, realising what a prig she must sound. “Oh, its partly selfishness on my part, I expect, Richard,” she admitted.

Richard drew her head on to his shoulder, kissing her tired eyelids and her lips. “I do understand, darling, about setting one’s heart on a thing happening just as one had planned it, because for years I pictured all this—” With his free arm he sketched a gesture intended to include the whole crusade. “And no fight or homecoming has ever been quite the same without Robin.” He spoke with intentional lightness. Long ago in his sensitive youth Ann Capet had shocked him into seeing all women either as saints or sinners, and he always felt too iniquitous to make Berengaria his complete confidante. It didn’t occur to him that by sharing with her the burden of his sins and disappointments, instead of letting them sour his soul, he might help to dispel the lengthening shadows cast by the dissimilarity of their natures.

Berengaria, born to be a human helpmate instead of the little exquisite she looked, was not deceived by his understatement. “I know, too, what turning back at Beit Nuba must have cost you!” she said.

“I felt rather like Moses after he had seen the promised land,” said Richard, with a self-conscious laugh.

She turned against his shoulder, her puzzled eyes searching the dim outline of his profile. “You mean—you have
seen
Jerusalem?” she asked, realising how little of his life was really hers.

The little room was getting dark and Ida’s dish of fruit was just a black blotch now against the grey square of the window. Lying there in the half-light with his unfamiliar little beard, Richard looked somehow remote. His long, fine nose and cruel, tender mouth might have been carved in stone—just like an effigy of himself on some cathedral tomb. “Humbly—from afar,” he admitted, after a moment or two.

“But you asked Raymond to make that map”

“Oh, I never saw it in
that
way,” Richard hastened to explain. “Oddly enough, I never once thought about fortifications.” Apparently it had been one of those emotional experiences so moving to oneself, so difficult to describe.

“Was it that day when you’d been boar-hunting, and when you got back to camp and just sat and said nothing, although Blondel sang all your favourite songs?”

“Did he?” said Richard absently. “I never heard him. Everything seemed so insignificant afterwards. As usual, some Saracens came skirmishing down from the hills and let fly at us. We gave chase, of course, and I must have got separated from the rest of our party—”

“Blondel says you always do—”

“Well, you know how fast Fauvel is. And there was one cunning old emir who kept leading me on from rock to rock—”

Berengaria got up in search of a cloak. The nights were bitterly cold. “You know very well they do it purposely to get the reward Saladin offered if you were captured alive,” she said, groping in the gathering gloom for the camel-hair burnous Richard had had made for her.

“That wasn’t what this one got!” he laughed harshly. Now that he had begun to tell her about it his self-consciousness was dissipated in a sort of inward excitement. He swung his feet to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped loosely between his knees. “When the going got too rough for Fauvel, I dismounted and scrambled after him to a sort of ledge. A kind of eagles’ aerie right against the sky, if you can imagine it. And when I had severed his grinning face from his shuddering shoulders I was so blown with the climb that I stood over him for a bit just resting on the handle of my sword.”

Berengaria shivered and drew the soft camel-hair closely about her own shoulders. She could imagine it only too well.

“And when I looked up there was a lovely panorama set out on the far side of the hill. The bare plain was down there, just as Raymond described it, and beyond that some more hills. And in the distance I saw the Holy City.”

There was such awed happiness in Richard’s voice that Berengaria stood watching him, her face a white disc of arrested interest in the soft folds of her hood. The rich embroidery of the bed cover was all bunched about his knees, and as he leaned forward to throw another cake of fuel on to the fire a dull glow illuminated both his absorbed face and the fierce heraldic beasts. “The sun was setting behind me and the whole plain was bathed in an unearthly radiance,” he said, carefully rebuilding his vision for her word by word. “By the light of it I could see the great walls and imagine the exact position of the Golden Gate I had dreamed of setting wide to Christendom. And a little straggle of trees beside the Kedron brook showed the way my Saviour must have walked up the little Mount of Olives.” The unaffected simplicity with which Richard spoke of the Christ came almost as a shock to Berengaria. In common with most great leaders whose daily life is a hazard with death, she supposed, his God must be very near—or nothing.

“It was all so remote, unreal, impregnable—shut in like that by the bare Judean hills,” he was saying in that vibrant voice. “Somehow, Berengaria, I knew then that I should never take it.” He paused for a moment, trying with unpractised mind to express the essence of the experience for her. In his inward searching he was unaware that the sincerity of his words had drawn her close beside him. “It was as if I stood all bloody and sweat-stained with the way I had come to meet the Christ. And he didn’t want the proud standards I had mocked or the cities I had sacked nor even the dead Saracen between my feet. But in that high, still solitude He let me look into His heart. And it was full of peace. Enough peace to flood the whole world, I felt—if only men wanted it…” Richard’s attitude relaxed with the cessation of mental effort, and his pleasant voice took on the flatness of normal life again. “And so I rode home, my head stuffed with half-understood dreams,” he said, almost apologetically. “And the next day I was down with fever…”

Berengaria was kneeling beside him, her eyes sweet with unshed tears. “Poor Richard! And you learning everything that could possibly make you a good soldier ever since you were a boy!” she said, bending to brush her soft cheek against the hardness of his hand. “But even if you never take Jerusalem there are other ways of serving the Christian world. After all, the spirit of Christ can’t be walled in any one city. If He died for the grossest of sinners surely it must be wide and pitiful enough to touch good Moslems and Jews? And isn’t it, perhaps, a more work-a-day thing than you suppose?” she suggested, lifting her face challengingly. “Isn’t it in the hands of people who are trying to heal the sick or carve something beautiful right up in the roof of some cathedral? I’m sure it’s in the laughter of children—and perhaps a little even in our own lives.”

Richard drew her closer. “Robin had the same sort of idea,” he said. “I thought it blasphemy then.”

Berengaria hoped that when they got to England Richard would succeed in finding Robin. She had never been jealous of him as she was of Ida. Somehow, one knew that his love was never possessive. “When you outlaw a man in your country does it mean that anyone can kill him?” she asked.

“Of course. But no one is likely to. At least, I am saved that much contrition! D’you know, ’Garia, Robin’s so strong that when we’re wrestling he can throw me over his shoulder as easily as that.” With one of his old flamboyant gestures, Richard reached for the heavy stool she had been sitting on and lifted it by a leg to demonstrate his boast. It was high above his head before he realised that he was supposed to be ill. As he put it down he whistled softly and their eyes met in delighted amusement.

“Why, Richard, you’re cured!” she cried. “There must have been something in those herbs that cooled your fever almost instantly.” While Richard stood up flexing his muscles experimentally, she ran to the door and called Blondel.

“That Saracen will be able to go now,” said Richard, feeling in his wallet for something to give him. “He
must
have thought us a mistrustful lot!”

With her usual graciousness Berengaria turned to thank the man. But Blondel came hurrying in with a couple of torches and as the shifting lights stabilised they wiped out the shadows behind the open door. Berengaria stopped short. “Why, Richard, he’s gone!” she exclaimed.

He took one of the torches from Blondel and held it steadily aloft so that it showed up all four corners. “There is only the window,” he said. “But it was getting dark, you remember, and those Arabs are like cats.”

“I had forgotten all about him,” admitted Berengaria, trying to remember all they had been talking about. “A good thing he didn’t speak Norman.”

“I wonder?” said Richard, in an odd sort of voice. Blondel had picked up a torn scrap of parchment from the place where the man had been squatting and the two of them were examining it by the light of the torch.

“It looks like part of a letter,” Blondel was saying.

“It
is
part of a letter,” corroborated Richard. “In Norman. Here’s a broken bit of my seal—and my own words ‘our dear sister Johanna.’ It’s part of the letter I wrote trying to bluff Saladin.” Berengaria pressed against his elbow to stare at the incontrovertible evidence. “Then it was Saladin himself?” she marvelled.

“You met him after all, Sir!” said Blondel, knowing well what this must mean to him.

Richard laughed heartily and handed back the torch. “So two of us can play at that game!” he remarked; but he stood for a long time holding the scrap of parchment and staring at the bed where he had lain in his weakness, alone with a woman and the man he had come out here to kill. Having come to the end of his campaign, he let his thoughts review it. It had been good fun, and bits of it had been something that Normandy and England might remember—he was ashamed only about the Austrian standard and the murdered prisoners. All his life his heart would bleed secretly about Jerusalem. But it wasn’t so hard to go home now because he knew his crusading could never be so whole-hearted again. The spell Eleanor had woven about his youth was broken. He had come to that moment of maturity when a man finds his religion is personal, but God is universal.

Berengaria had taken a villa in Rome. She had been there all the summer because her husband’s crazy pilgrimage had ended much as she had predicted. At first Europe had been entertained by rumours of Richard’s incredible adventures. He had been heard of posing as a pirate at Ragusa and as a merchant at Corfu, and a party of pilgrims swore to having seen him just outside Venice. Then some ill-judged bravado seemed to have made him change his course in the direction of Vienna, of all cities, where his incurable swagger and an over-lavish tip appeared to have betrayed him into the hands of an officious underling of Duke Leopold. And since then there had been silence. Which was not surprising, seeing that the favourite tale told by soldiers returning from the East was how they had seen the King of England slashing down the Austrian standard at Acre.

As soon as King Sancho heard of his daughter’s plight he invited her to come home, but not all the pleasant comforts of Navarre could tempt her from the city where Richard had arranged to meet her. She knew that he must be either ill or in captivity or he would at least have managed to send her some message, and the tearing anxiety she had so often suffered during the crusade seemed brief and bearable compared with the long-drawn-out suspense she suffered now. Each day she tried to pray with something of his simplicity in the splendid churches, but at night she tossed on her soft bed dreaming of damp dungeons. All too clearly she remembered Leopold of Austria saying, “If ever the good God should put you in my power, Richard Plantagenet…”

Gradually, as the months wore on, people began to treat her as if she were a widow. But if there was one thing she was sure of in her half-world of loneliness and uncertainty, it was that Richard was not dead. “I shall know the moment Leopold kills him,” she would tell herself fiercely, feeling that something would die in her own heart. Whereas the part of her that had been so starved in Syria was now very much alive. Hating herself for it, she enjoyed the famous pictures and libraries, the cultured, cosmopolitan society of Rome, and the comforts of her own villa. And most of all she appreciated the unselfishness of Raymond and Johanna in staying with her when she felt sure they must be aching to get on with their own lives. “Richard put you in my charge,” Raymond would argue with his lovable doggedness, “and it is up to me to see that no one molests you.”

“I am nearly thirty,” laughed Berengaria. “Who is likely to molest me?”

But one evening when Raymond and Johanna were out riding, her sense of security was shaken. She had had a book brought out to her favourite seat in the forecourt beside a little fountain that splashed pleasantly into a low-walled pool. She had reason to be more hopeful than she had been for weeks because she and Johanna had seen Richard’s sword hanging up in an armourer’s shop. The owner had told them that some drunken Austrian soldiers had sold it to him with a fuddled story about a giant of a prisoner who had thrown three of them into their own moat before they could get him shut up in Triffels castle. So when the gate bell clanged and there was a clatter of horsemen outside, Berengaria’s heart leapt with the wild hope that it might be Richard himself. But one of her hired Italian servants came back to say it was a knight called Chalus.

Remembering how the correct little Duke of Austria used to frequent Chalus’s bacchanalian parties, Berengaria thought that at least her visitor might have news of Richard. So she rose eagerly, a finger still between the illuminated pages on the bookstand before her. She had no idea what a picture she made standing in the soft evening light between two dark, tapering cypresses, nor how a flush of anger became her when Chalus seized the unoffered hand lying against the sombre folds of her gown and covered it with hungry kisses. “A much fitter setting for you than the fever-ridden ports of the Levant!” he said, with awkward gallantry. “If I had a beautiful jewel I wouldn’t leave it lying about my battlefields.”

“No, you would probably keep it locked up,” answered Berengaria, with asperity. “Have you brought any news of my husband?”

“I am afraid we must assume that he is dead, Madam,” he said ingratiatingly. “The way you have waited for him is profoundly touching, but to a lonely widower like me it seems such waste!”

Berengaria surveyed the man as if he were an offensive groom. He looked strong and cunning with his brutish limbs and dark, hirsute face. She could hear the rough laughter of his men on the other side of the wall and wished that Blondel were about. “What have you come for then?” she asked on a note of fear.

He laughed and came closer so that she could almost feel the heat of his eager breath. “I think you know that I collect beautiful things…”

“Of course,” agreed Berengaria, with a hurried assumption of ease. “And we have kept your gold circlet all this time! It is inexcusable of us, particularly as I understand you have a passion for Roman antiques.” She would have called someone to fetch it, but he forestalled interruption by reaching impatient arms for the treasure he coveted most. “I have a stronger passion than that,” he declared, tearing through polite evasion with rough reality. “I may not be a king or a duke but I can tell you that I am one of the richest men in Europe. I can make up to you for all that selfish Turk-slayer made you suffer. I will give you books and gardens and jewels. And I don’t have to leave my women languishing alone while I go begging across Europe. I’ve all the gold I want—right handy on my own land—”

Berengaria saved herself from the insult of his greedy hands by overturning the heavy bookrest between them and clapping sharply for her servants. “If my husband were here you wouldn’t dare to touch me,” she said, her voice cold with fury.

“Perhaps not,” snarled Chalus, dancing with the pain of a bruised toe. “But we both know that he is dead.”

“I will show you that he is not,” said Berengaria. When her servants came running she sent one of them for her lady and one for her borrowed crown. To another she said, “Bring the sword you carried home for me from the market-place this morning.”

And the man brought Richard’s great two-handed sword and placed it across the marble arm’s of her garden seat, where it rested like a barrier before her.

Chalus recoiled, gaping at it. “It doesn’t prove anything,” he muttered. But to anyone who had been through the crusade and seen the weapon so constantly in its owner’s hand it was as if Richard himself stood between them. The man who had once sworn fealty to him touched the blunted blade mistrustfully. “It’s rusty. The junk man may have had it for months,” he pointed out. “Where did he get it from?”

Sitting there with both small hands spanning the handle, Berengaria could almost imagine it warm from her husband’s grip. She was no longer afraid. “Triffels,” she said, feeling no further need for caution.

“Triffels,” repeated Chalus, stroking his horrid little black beard calculatingly. “The Duke of Austria has a fine new castle there, if I remember rightly.” As if to hide the idea brightening his shrewd, simian eyes he asked abruptly, “How much did you give for it?” As a collector, he would have liked to possess the Cœur de Lion’s sword as well as his wife. The value of it would increase with the years, like the fame of his courage.

“Ten ducats,” answered Berengaria, getting up at the welcome sound of her relatives’ voices and going towards the gate. “I suppose the jewels were so enormous it never occurred to him that they could be real.”

“Funny, part of the regalia of England being sold in an open market as bits of coloured glass!” A good bargain was the breath of life to Chalus, and he went on laughing about it even after Raymond and Johanna had returned from their ride and Yvette had brought him the box containing his circlet. No one invited him into the villa and after their horses had been led away and drinks brought they stood waiting for him to go. His own horses were champing restlessly outside, and even his complacency could not out-sit such aloofness for long.

“I shall be passing through Triffels on my way to Vienna, and I flatter myself I have some influence with Leopold,” he boasted, taking leave of his unresponsive hostess. “Is there anything you would like me to say to him?”

If he hoped to trade on the desperate anxiety of this self-contained family, the effect was negligible. “You might ask after his bulbs,” suggested Johanna, trying to swing her brother’s heavy sword and looking irritatingly like him in her riding kit. They all went on with whatever they were doing and let Barbe of Chalus go out into the hot street, hugging his gold. After all, he was Richard’s vassal and a fellow crusader, and had a perfect right to snoop round Triffels if he liked. But they did not tell him that they had sent Blondel on the same errand six hours earlier.

“What on earth did the old money-grabber come for?” asked Johanna, almost before her husband’s fat page, Nando, had bolted the gate behind him.

“To persuade me into bigamy,” laughed Berengaria contemptuously. “Or he may really have believed that Richard was dead,” she added hastily, seeing her cousin’s hand fly to his sword.

“If you really want to protect us, Ray, for Heaven’s sake don’t go out and get murdered by his cut-throats before Blondel comes back!” entreated Johanna, watching their departure from a little pagan temple built in the wall. At first she saw only a jumble of men’s heads and horses’ flanks and bits of tossing steel. Then she beckoned urgently to her sister-in-law. “Look quickly!” she cried, parting the tendrils of an over-grown vine. “The girl on the little dappled jennet immediately behind Chalus.”

As the jennet pricked daintily after his big, black horse, the girl pulled off her shady hat to shake back her dark curls with a gesture familiar to them both. “It’s Ida Comnenos,” said Berengaria harshly. “And she’s going with him to Triffels.”