The Passionate Brood (28 page)

He leaned a shoulder against his tree trunk and lied cheerfully. “Not in the least!” he assured her, for her own good. The lame doe came and rubbed against his knee, and he bent to scratch the top of her head. It was uncanny the way animals never feared him.

Johanna tried to coax her away from him, but she would not come. “Then all I said—and the way I clung to you—that last night in the herb garden, was just—cheap?”

Robin stopped fondling the little dappled beast. “It was the most blessed thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “But, don’t you see, I owed everything to your parents and I knew their plans for you.” He was silent a moment, remembering that awful morning in the King’s workroom when he had been told of them, and how he had said, “Yes, Sir,” like a dolt and blotted the important treaty he was drawing up. “You were only a child,” he went on. “How could I warn you and smash your happiness? But even when we were all happiest together I always knew that our separation must come.”

“And so it was easier for you?”

“I had had a long time in which to school myself,” Robin answered guardedly.

“And—when you heard William was dead?”

“I didn’t—until after you had left Sicily.”

Johanna was quick in her elder brother’s defence. “Richard tried to tell you. He was out searching the woods all night. But he doesn’t know them as you do. And there was a terrible thunderstorm…”

Robin’s eyes were shining. “Did he do that?” he kept saying. He came and stood beside her, one foot on the log. “This morning a fellow we outlaws had befriended told me the King was at Guildford, so when I heard the horn I went down to the edge of the pool and peered through the branches. I was hoping to see him.”

“Poor Robin!”

He met her sympathy with a ready smile. “I didn’t see you either. You weren’t with the others. Only that godless brute, John. My men say they’ve seen him snooping after that girl before. He must pick on just the decent, hard-working sort of family the country needs. You know, I’ve been following that precious brother of yours about ever since Richard left—trying to restrain his men’s cruelty and to undo some of the mischief he does—without letting him get a rope round my neck. And believe me, it was a feast day for me being able to stick an arrow into his pampered flesh!”

“That explains something he said up there in the lane. He feels your influence thwarting him.” Johanna bent to gather some primroses and arranged them consideringly. “And yet he loves England too.”

“He covets it,” corrected Robin.

“But he often does things for the people. He was telling us last night how he had taken the bridge at Godalming away from the Abbots and given it to the town.”

“To annoy the Abbots,” laughed Robin.

“But they’d been charging the poor market people a toll every time they used it.”

“And now the poor market people will probably let it get into disrepair. John loves cheap popularity but he hasn’t much foresight.”

Johanna pinned her posy in the front of her gown, and Robin dismissed him contemptuously from their conversation. “The man’s growing fat,” he remarked. “Another six years and the way he’s lived will show in his face.”

Johanna surveyed his own lean, sinuous limbs with affection. Woman-like, she hoped he got enough to eat. She felt they were both skirting the subject they wanted to talk about, and she preferred to ride full-tilt at things. “Richard has gone up to St. Martyr’s,” she told him.

His slow, affectionate grin was more telling than any show of sentiment. “They tell me he’s grown a beard,” he said.

“It makes him look older—and much sterner. It suits him in a way, I suppose—but Berengaria says she’s lost the young man with the devastating mouth she fell in love with.”

“Why didn’t she come with him? Is it true they quarrelled?”

Johanna nodded sombrely, picking shreds of bark from the birch on which she sat. “Over Isaac Comnenos’s daughter. Richard was fool enough to bring her to England. As a hostage for the Cypriotes’ good behaviour, he says.”

Robin flung himself from her with an angry exclamation and began pacing back and forth across the sward, beating one fist upon the other. Except that he was more graceful, some of his gestures were ridiculously like Richard’s. “You Plantagenets!” he raged. “Must you quarrel with
everything
you love? Probably he doesn’t care two hoots for the baggage, but it’s to be hoped Berengaria will be big enough to forgive him. If she came and settled down here and raised a family, there’d be some chance of his stopping in England.”

“Why should he?” challenged Johanna resentfully. “Normandy’s more important. And he was Duke of Aquitaine before he was King of England.” Robin, she knew, thought of them all as servants to his precious island. Whereas they, in spite of their father’s precepts, still thought of it as a gift from their great-grandfather—a place to enjoy. That, she supposed, was what Robin meant about the difference between John’s love for it and his own. But what did it all matter when she was with him again and had so much to tell him? She sat there twanging the string of his bow as if it were a harp and enjoying his rare impatience. “Berengaria may be unreasonably jealous,” she told him, “but at least she sticks to the rules herself. When I was in Rome she was sick with anxiety for Richard, but she refused to buy his release by selling herself to the richest man in Europe.”

“Chalus, you mean?”

Johanna looked up quickly, surprised that an outlawed Saxon should even have heard of him. But she hurried on with her tale. “And then, inevitably, she tortured herself, wondering if she had been over-fastidious or mean. You’d like her, Robin.” She went on, covering the foul name he called Chalus. “She simply hates war and makeshift living in tents, and yet look how she nursed Richard through all that heat at Haifa!”

“Heaven bless her!” ejaculated Robin.

“She has far more self-control than we have. She never once complained about the dirt and the discomfort although she herself was far from well at Acre.”

Robin swung round at mention of the place. “God, what wouldn’t I have given to see Richard raise that siege!” he exclaimed. Johanna hadn’t realised what it must have cost him to give up his share in such adventure. He came and sat on the log beside her, and she told him the whole long story of the crusade, what people had said and done, how Richard had laughed and fought and triumphed and been frustrated—making it all live for him as if he had been there. It was the best gift she could give him, since for England’s sake she hadn’t been able to give him herself. He opened his pouch and shared his midday meal with her as he had done many a time beside the Thames, and neither of them noticed how the noonday sun was slipping westward.

“It must have been well nigh unbearable for him, leaving Jerusalem untaken!” he said.

“The thing I regret most was his killing all those prisoners outside Acre. Berengaria begged him not to, but she was too tragic about it. If you’d been there he wouldn’t have done it. And you’d probably have stopped him from quarrelling with Leopold. It was funny at the time, of course. And Blondel and I both felt you’d have known how to keep it—just funny.” Johanna saw it clearly, how Robin had always been the complement of Richard, keeping him at his best. Richard was the more spectacular, but Robin was the stronger. Richard with his head in the clouds, Robin with his feet on the soil…She turned to him impulsively. “My dear, won’t you let me ask Richard if you may come back?”

But Robin was no plaster saint to make the first move. He had been grievously and unjustly hurt. Even now, it was hell to think of them all up at the Castle and he and Hodierna not there. It would be wonderful, of course, to ride back with Johanna now. To take a chance on it. A stab in the back from John’s men-at-arms or the chance of a handgrip from Richard. To walk into the hall he knew so well and warm himself at the fires of friendship, to kiss his beloved white-haired Queen and put his feet under a civilised table again…Silks and velvets and napery, coming and going of well-trained servants, the stimulating talk of travelled men, the laughter of well-born women. What right had any man, in maniac anger, to cut him off from these? Robin shook the bitterness from his mind and pressed Johanna’s pleading hand. “No, no, sweet. Believe me, it’s better as it is. I find there are things I can do—contacts I can make—which were impossible while I lived with you. Perhaps if I believed Richard would really stay…But we both know him so well. The first time he gets another chance at Jerusalem, or Philip casts an eye on a bit of his land…Your mother’s getting too old to take an active part when he goes. There’d be just John and me. I’m not even your father’s bastard, but the people would follow me. And that would mean another civil war.”

Johanna smoothed out a bit of birch bark on her knee. The under side of it was pink and silver like one of Berengaria’s beautiful gowns. “I suppose that would be worse than having us conquer you,” she admitted.

But Robin was never serious for long. “My dear child,” he mocked lazily, “
did
you conquer us? I rather thought we just absorbed you.”

“Absorbed us?”

Robin moved to a grassy hummock in the sunshine and sat there hugging his knees. “Haven’t we borrowed all your best words and enriched our strain with your haughty blue blood?” he demanded.

“Why do we keep saying ‘we’ and ‘you?’” complained Johanna. “You’re really part of everything, with a Saxon father and mother whose people were half Roman. And then being brought up with us. But you ought to love us best!”

Robin answered her with categorical honesty. “I love your swiftness and your efficiency, and even your splendid anger. Sometimes I envy your arrogance. I want these things as leaven to our Saxon stolidness. But I hate your everlasting quarrelling and warmongering. It doesn’t give us a chance. I want the people of this country to have years of peace so that they can earn a square meal without stealing some over-fed Norman’s deer. I want their fields and their lives to be their own so that they don’t have to go and be butchered in your petty foreign squabbles. I want their children to learn to read. You know, Johanna, it would be exciting to write a book, not in solemn Latin, but in this everyday new language we are making—this English.”

“So that we should come to think the same kind of thoughts?”

“Imagine the result! Courage welded to good-humour, efficiency to patience. It should produce a breed who would seek peace and ensure it—but who’d fight with their last breath to prevent another Hastings.”

It was getting chilly and Johanna stood up, shaking the bark shavings from her lap. “Oh, Robin, you always did want queer, idealistic sort of things!” she said, thinking how utterly different his ambitions were from Richard’s. “Don’t you ever want anything for yourself?”

With effortless grace he was on his feet as soon as she. “More than anything I want your happiness,” he said gravely. “By all accounts you have married a man this time.”

Johanna stood curling the last little strip of bark round her finger. She felt that she must pronounce some sort of judgment because he really wanted to know. “He is the sort of man every woman wants to father her children,” she said slowly. She didn’t know what made her say it. She had never thought of Raymond particularly in that way before. The thought had crystallised only as the words passed her lips, but she recognised it as the truth. And she and Robin stood at a place between two long separations where nothing less than the truth would do.

A sudden shouting and the baying of deep-throated hounds brought them back to immediate reality. Instinctively, Johanna moved to shield him from the direction of the sound. The colour was drained from her face. It had been so lovely talking to him again that she had forgotten he was outlawed, and that by her impulsive coming she had endangered him.

“It’s probably you they’re looking for,” he reminded her.

She smiled, half reassured. “I suppose it is. I expect Richard sent them. But they’re John’s hounds—and they’ll comb these woods.” For the first time they noticed how the sun had moved westward, transforming their sanctuary with its slanting shafts of light into an ordinary Surrey wood. “I must go,” she whispered.

Robin walked with her to the edge of the clearing. Her heart sang with pride because, although the shouts and baying were drawing nearer, he neither hurried nor looked away from her. “I should tell Richard what you told me—about Berengaria refusing that swine, Chalus,” he counselled. “It might bring them together.” His last thoughts were for Richard but his smile was for her. He stooped to lift a trailing bramble from her path and watched her go out of his life. His real renunciation had been made when she was seventeen.

Johanna walked swiftly to intercept John’s men, and as she walked her hands were cupped against her breast as if she held something infinitely precious. She had a queer feeling that she and Robin could never really be parted again. Like many very vital people, she had always feared death; but now she was sustained by a certainty that when the time came for her to go out alone into the darkness, Robin would be there, waiting for her. And that his smile would warm her desolation…

After all, she found that the search party had not come to look for her but for Ida. And up at the Castle everybody took it for granted she had been doing the same. Her mother and Richard were so worried about the girl and so annoyed with John that they asked Johanna no questions at all. John himself had retired to bed. So presently, when news came that their foreign visitor had been found trying to persuade a party of pilgrims to take her to the coasts, Johanna left the hall and went upstairs to the Constable’s room. Her husband was still there working with his sheriff. She closed the door quietly behind her and leaned against it, uncertain of her reception. But although they had parted in anger and she had been horribly rude to him, Raymond looked up from the document he was signing and smiled at her. Quick to meet his generosity, she came and perched on the arm of his chair. She took the quill from his fingers, and he leaned back with a sigh of relief and dismissed the man immediately. “Did you want to tell me something?” he asked, watching her thoughtful face.