The Passionate Brood (30 page)

Blondel had not been gone many minutes before Richard became aware of someone blocking out the light. He looked up from his parchments to see Berengaria standing in the entrance of their tent; but he saw her only with the vagueness of long habit. The only thing he really noticed about her was that her arms were full of wild flowers. He was concerned for her safety and, like most anxious husbands, spoke irritably. “For God’s sake, why must you loiter just there? An arrow struck the very spot only a few minutes ago.”

Berengaria came further into the tent. She moved with a sort of weary indifference. Life had driven her a long way since her girlhood in Navarre when she shrank from a cut wrist at a tournament. “One gets so used to arrows and blood and maimed bodies,” she said. She stood for a moment bearing the thudding reverberations as Mercadier began battering at a fresh breach, then relaxed with a shrug and sniffed delicately at her flowers. “But the meadows are still lovely where your war machines haven’t crushed the buttercups.”

“No sane woman would want to wander about picking buttercups beside a besieged castle,” snapped Richard.

Berengaria made a separate posy of a few straggling wild roses and remembered that her rare bush ones would just be coming out in Navarre. “Most women have gardens to keep them sane,” she reminded him with bitterness.

He laid down his measure with a sigh of exasperation. “
Must
we go all over that again?” he asked. “I’m only trying to tell you that the castle garrison have found our range. This striped tent is too conspicuous. You’d better use Yvette’s and Blondel can come in here with me.”

Berengaria had to laugh. It was so like him not even to notice how the sun and rain of innumerable battlefields had faded Johanna’s gay wedding gift to the drabness of any other tent. She looked round at the littered interior and wondered where she should put her flowers. “I suppose it would be profane to use the
casus belli
?” she suggested, seeing Chalus’s vase perched incongruously on the edge of the table as a parchment weight. She laid her flowers beside it and tilted it to examine its earth-stained interior. Instantly the plan Richard was examining sprang back into an exasperating roll. He disentangled it from the sticky stems of sorrel and dog daisies, and carried the pretentious golden thing across to an uncluttered table for her. “You know very well it isn’t the vase itself,” he said, viewing the fat embossed figures on it with aversion. “It’s the principle of the thing. Chalus should have reported it to me, not gloated over it with Philip.”

“But he sent it out to you quite civilly when you came for it,” objected Berengaria, briskly swilling out his treasure and filling it with water from her ewer. Much as she loathed Chalus, she had no desire to go on punishing him. All she cared about was getting to some settled and civilised habitation.

“He cheated me,” declared Richard, wondering if she had really been flattered by the way the beast had hung round after her. “The ploughman who turned it up swears the ground was cluttered with Roman coins and they carried them up to the castle. For all I know there’s enough gold up there to build another Château Gaillard!” It was unspoken knowledge between them that Berengaria hated the place. It had come to mean to him what her children should have meant. But he picked up the main plan and held it aloft. He knew it to be the complete answer to every general’s dreams, and it was inconceivable to him that anyone could look upon it without appreciating its perfection. He himself had gazed at it so often, both in stone and on parchment, that he only spoke his thoughts aloud when he said, “When I’m dead this lovely, solid daughter of my brain will stand to protect my land in place of the sons my body has been denied.”

Berengaria dropped the gold vase with a crash. It went rolling behind their bed. It might have rolled back to Barbe for all Richard really cared as he swung round and caught her in his arms. Even the parchment towers of Andely rolled unheeded too. “Forgive me!” he entreated. “It was like my clumsiness to say that! I know it’s worse for you, sweet. And at least I haven’t had to lose you, my dear, my very dear, like poor Raymond lost Johanna!”

Berengaria allowed herself the relief of tears. “It seems so unbelievable that anyone so gay and kind should die!” she cried brokenly against his shoulder.

Richard stroked her hair and said gently, “I am so thankful Mother got there in time—and to be with Raymond afterwards.” It was all the comfort he could find.

Berengaria gathered up her scattered flowers and tried to be bright and practical. “You do think she’ll come here on her way back to England, don’t you? I’m s-sorry about the vase.”

Richard picked it up absently and began putting his plans back in the open chest. He was beginning to wonder if all this pother about vengeance was worth the time it stole from one’s life. If it hadn’t been for this trumped-up business of Chalus, they too might have been in time to see Johanna again. “I’ll have every man of them hanged!” he vowed savagely.

Berengaria gave tongue to something which had always puzzled her. “Why do you let hatred for Philip sour your life and yet—even now you know about the money—you can forgive that treacherous thief John?”

“I can go back any time and undo what he has done,” explained Richard confidently. “But what Philip did cost me—Jerusalem.” He stood staring down at his possessions in the great coffer, but he was really seeing the grey river lapping the walls of Westminster, the homeliness of Oxford, and the windswept sweetness of St. Martyr’s. A sudden nostalgia for his island assailed him. He shut the lid with a bang, and went and perched on Berengaria’s table, pulling her hands impatiently from the buttercups and daisies. His green eyes were shining. “’Garia, I’ll be glad when we get back to England!” he said, with sudden urgency.

Berengaria stared at him unresponsively and pulled away her hands. He was saying it just five years too late. “Back!” she echoed coldly. “You forget I’ve never been there.”

“Then you shouldn’t have sent me that crushing letter from Rome.”

“You had that Cypriot girl with you.” It was all so long ago that she found she could speak of it almost objectively.

Richard reddened beneath his tan. “I told you I was sorry about that,” he reminded her. “But still you wouldn’t come.”

“You seemed to be enjoying quite a blaze of bachelor popularity without me.”

“How could I help it if a lot of love-sick women followed me about?”

“Oh, well, you know you adored it all, Richard!” she said, finishing her floral effect and pushing the vase from her. “And if only I had known you were going to cram all the work you owed to England into eight short months, I would have come instead of behaving like a jealous fool. It looks as if I shall be the only English queen who never saw England!”

“No, no, my dear. We’re really going this time—as soon as I’ve exterminated this rat who dared to make eyes at you.” He put an arm round her waist and whispered against her cheeks “I promise you—”

But Berengaria turned from his blandishments and sat down on the end of the bed. “For eight years you’ve been making promises, and I’ve been trying to live on them,” she told him, determined for once to disentangle facts from passion. “Didn’t you promise, that blue and gold morning in Cyprus, to love and cherish me? Is this cherishing?” She looked round the tent contemptuously. Each time she moved, discarded pieces of armour clinked together on the bedcover behind her and the rich Persian prayer mats de Lusignon had brought her for a wedding present were kicked askew by the constant tramping of dusty feet. She thought of the ordered graciousness and mental stimulous of life in Pamplona and realised that she and Richard had begun to live inwardly with their own thoughts because they had nothing fresh to say to each other. It riled her to know that, had they lived peaceably in London or Rouen, her own accomplishments need not have been frustrated. “I seem to have no one to talk to but Yvette,” she complained. “And I miss Johanna so!” She saw Richard wince, but she was in the state of nervous strain when the very dumbness of his grief annoyed her. “Oh, I know she was yours!” she flared. “But what time have you to fret? Even when you come in to meals you are planning some fresh sortie. I only have the real you when you are too sick to sit in a saddle. Or when you’re too tired to do anything but seek oblivion in some woman’s arms. Any woman who is fool enough to follow you from one foul battlefield to another!”

Richard gripped her gesticulating wrists. “It’s a lie!” he protested, livid with rage.

In spite of her imprisoned hands, she went on hysterically. The dam of her composure had suddenly snapped, and her long-pent grievances flowed over him in full spate, gathering momentum from the lashing of her unconsidered words. “It’s true! It’s true!” she insisted. “What do you care for my thoughts? What use have you for my leisure? Except that there are silk trappings to this bed and a lot of silly heraldic beasts, how am I different from those bedraggled strumpets following the baggage wagons?”

Such wild talk was so unlike her that Richard’s anger turned to bewilderment. “I’d no idea—” he began, letting go her hands. But she interrupted him, mockingly, “That’s just the tragedy, isn’t it? Two people living together—thinking they know each other—and they’ve no idea…”

She was right, of course. It had been like that between himself and Robin. Richard saw now that all these years, while he had chosen their way of living, his wife’s nerves must have been getting like the ropes of his catapults—more and more taut until they relaxed suddenly and let fly. He noticed how the hands he had crushed so roughly went to her temples as the biggest battering-ram of all thudded against the tough masonry of the outer wall. “Hi, you, Thomas,” he shouted to the sentry outside, “tell someone to ask Captain Mercadier to stop that infernal din for a while.”

The sentry disappeared, but inside the tent Berengaria’s voice went on. The suffering of her sensitiveness must all be laid bare at last. “And what about all your fine promises?” she railed. “The poor people who gave all they possessed to pay your ransom—and lionised you as no hard-working, stay-at-home king has ever been lionised?”

He tried to soothe her—to tell her that it would be only a few days now before he mopped up Chalus’s garrison. But she got up—tense as a tragedy queen—and asked with contemptuous vehemence if he had ever considered what it meant to a woman brought up as she had been to live for eight years within sight and sound of his butcherings.

Like most good women driven beyond the limit of their endurance, she was being bitterly unfair. He took her gently by the arms. “That first night in Limassol I warned you that war is my trade,” he reminded her.

“As mothering is mine,” she countered. She struggled to get away from him and, failing, turned her head aside. Her lovely voice was low and monotonous as if she were repeating an oft-told tale. “That day at Acre—when you slaughtered three thousand bound prisoners—your son turned from you in my womb. And when your light-o’-love held up the Saracen’s head to frighten me—he died unborn.”

She had not meant to tell him that, and now that she had said the words, nothing could ever recall the knowledge. Richard’s horrified remorse was patent. He pulled her close, his unhappy eyes searching her white face. For the first time he really saw her as a tired woman and not as the radiant girl he had married. “’Garia! I didn’t know,” he swore. “My mind was blind with rage because those Moslems had tricked me. I’ve dragged you through hell, haven’t I? I ought to have taken better care of you. I’m ashamed.” Because his passion for her was unquenchable, he began kissing her closed eyelids. “But we’ve known Heaven too, beloved!” he exulted. “The still desert nights…The stars at dawn…Surely no woman since Eve can have been so passionately loved?” His lips crushed hers. His strength bruised her small, soft breasts. But for the first time she fought the compelling ecstasy for which she had sacrificed so much. Her head went back defiantly against his arm, her eyes met his accusingly. “As an antidote to war,” she jeered, hurting him through that part of their love which had been most perfect. “Even under those stars I remembered your arms were brute strong from killing, and between your kisses I’ve tried not to think about the distorted dead. Don’t you suppose your damnably caressing hands have often set me wondering how it must feel to lie helpless beneath your plunging sword? I’ve imagined the smell of blood on that persuasive mouth of yours until its passion sickened me…” She stopped short, aghast at the things she was saying—knowing them to be only half true. She had been so utterly in love with him that often and often she had forgotten everything but joy in his masterful tenderness. Her eyes fell before his. “Oh, Richard, so much has been spoiled for me!” she added, more accurately. “I wish we could have lived at peace!”

“God forgive me! We will live differently,” he muttered, stroking the sable smoothness of her hair. “Only have patience…”

The storm of her self-pity was spent. The lost dimple he loved began, rather tremulously, to dent her cheek. “Perhaps it would have been better if I hadn’t tried to be patient for eight years,” she suggested. “For now I seem to have none left.”

He drew her gently back to the bed, and they sat there side by-side, holding each other’s hand like a pair of lost children. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, without rancour.

“Let me take Yvette to the nuns at Fontevrault. She oughtn’t to stay here much longer, and she always thinks of that as her home place. In a way it’s yours too, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed Richard, thinking of the solemn abbey with the carved tombs of all the Angevins since his great-grandfather Faulk.

“Yvette says the nuns have a beautiful walled garden with cool, clipped walks—and cloisters and libraries—and fruit trees and rose bushes. The roses will just be in bloom.” Berengaria’s cheeks were pink again and her eyes shining with anticipation.

“Now you look more like my kind tournament princess,” he teased.

She put her arms round his neck and hid her face in shame. “Please, please, Richard, forgive me for all the cruel things I have said—and for leaving you,” she implored. “But I just can’t stand this tent another day! Honestly, I think if I have to look at another wounded soldier I shall go mad.”