The Passionate Brood (5 page)

“The more reason, Sir, why you should pass on some of the responsibility to me.” Henry spoke with cool restraint, but Richard was still raw from seeing Johanna hurt. “You sent me to fight for my possession of Aquitaine when I was no older than John,” he stormed, “and if you will not let me rule it independently and get married, by God’s beard, I will do homage to Louis of France!”

The King leaned forward, his hands clenched so tightly on the arms of his chair that the strong, golden hairs on the backs of his hands seemed to bristle with rage. “So that’s how you spent your time abroad? Plotting with that young fop, Philip, against me?”

Although the feudal laws were on his side, Richard had the grace to look ashamed. “Don’t I owe France fealty for it since I had it through my mother?” he argued.

“And don’t you owe me some sort of reverence? How many times have I explained that with Ann in our hands still unmarried we can make better terms with France? You shall have her as soon as these disputes about her dowry are settled.”

The King realised that Richard’s heritage was responsible for his continental outlook and he was making an effort to be friendly to his sons. After all, he never
intended
their conversations to be unpleasant. Sometimes he overheard scraps of talk when they were with their mother—thoughts tossed as lightly as shuttlecocks and caught with inconsequent laughter, while they grouped themselves comfortably round her chair. He would have liked to talk with them easily like that, but when he tried they stood defensively polite, or drifted away to some aerie in the Tower. Only John seemed to understand his longing and stay. And John, in consequence, learned a good deal—for Henry the Second of England was a knowledgeable man, with sound civic sense. He had given opportunity of learning to them all. Already the philosophers and scientists and men of letters he had gathered together were making Oxford rival the universities of Paris and Bologna; but it was characteristic of his domestic disappointments that only Robin, the woodman’s son, had profited by it. Robin studied astrology and invented all manner of useful devices for his countrymen. He had even written a book. A brilliant book about the works of nature which he loved, in which he tilted against cruelty and superstition.

When the King worked like a galley slave to give the Saxons a fair deal, rising at dawn to ride from town to town until he knew more than most of his subjects about the price of pigs or the prosperity of his ports, Eleanor laughed down her aristrocratic nose and said he was turning the English into a nation of shopkeepers. But Robin understood the international importance of trade and the social necessity of satisfied peasants. Consequently the King often wished he had been born authentic Plantagenet and kept him with his sons, hoping he would influence headstrong Richard.

But Richard seemed interested in nothing but sport and war. He was the most difficult of them all. And the most popular. He was generous, direct, and dependable—but gullible. Yes, easily gullible. The King roused himself from his reverie with a queer, secret smile. “And, I suppose, in the meantime, some of us will have to join a crusade,” he said tentatively.

The magic topic, used to distract their attention, brought forth an even more startling result than he had expected. After a short silence Richard confessed with nervous aggression, “I have already taken the Cross, Sir.”

The King stared as if he had not heard aright. “Without our consent?” he exclaimed. And Henry, who seldom showed his anger, said sharply, “You’ve stolen a march on me!”

Defiantly, Richard told them how Bishop Bartholomew had been preaching on the steps of the cathedral as he came through Tours, how his moving words had recruited hundreds and how he himself had impulsively taken the vow.

“Crusades cost money,” objected his father.

“There are always women’s jewels and the Jews,” said Henry. “I shall go and raise some money in Normandy and come with you.”

They were both amazed how well their father had taken it. “I might help you,” he offered thoughtfully, seeing in it a cure for their discontent.

“That’s generous of you, Sir!” said Richard, all harshness immediately forgotten.

“Better fight the Saracens than make a shambles of Europe with your quarrelling!” chuckled the King. He heaved himself out of the chair stiffly as a middle-aged man will who has spent many hours in the saddle; but when crossing the hall to his bedroom, he squared his broad shoulders as if to cast off the burden of his family’s importunities before going to his own still vigorous life. “You must both have patience,” he adjured, with a hand on the latch. “Put off the expense of marriage until you come back, Richard. Ann will be safer here.”

“We certainly don’t want any women on a crusade,” agreed Henry, remembering all the cumbersome things his mother had taken.

“And this question of a coronation can wait, Henry, if you are seriously preparing for the Holy Land.” Standing in the narrow archway of the door, the King looked back at them benignly and bade them good night.

They bowed formally. The door closed behind him, and he was gone. And they found themselves—as usual—no better off than they had been before.

Henry lounged back to the hearth, shoving the sleeping hound aside and tipping himself backwards in the chair his father had just vacated. “The old fox is still too cunning for us both,” he said, watching a spiral of smoke ascend to a louvre hidden in the blackened rafters. “He threw you a cunning bait, Richard.”

“A bait?” repeated Richard vaguely.

Henry shrugged impatiently at his density. “You—battering at the walls of Jerusalem. And Ann—here.”

But Richard only stared at him across the smoke. “By Heaven, Henry, you don’t really
believe
that poisonous old scandal, do you?”

“Didn’t she show a pretty venom when I suggested that she had no cause to love the fair Rosamund? Hoped I’d die young because I’ve the wit to see things.”

“You’d see mud on poor old Becket’s shrine!” muttered Richard. But clearly the old rumour had been bothering him.

“Well, there’s no particular virtue in being entirely devoid of subtlety. It leaves you straightforward fellows so defenceless. Why, even Robin says it shamed his nice Saxon susceptibilities to see Norman morality making such a fool of you!”

“Robin said
that
?”

“Funny that a peasant’s words should always have more power than mine to move you!” remarked Henry with bitterness.

“This time they’ll move me to the King!” swore Richard, always dangerously swift to act on an emotion.

With an agility usually camouflaged by a show of elegant indolence, Henry sprang to bar his brother’s way. “Don’t be an idiot! You daren’t disturb him at his prayers.”

The word ‘dare’ was always a goad to Richard. “What better time to get the truth?” he snapped.

Henry had not meant to provoke him into doing something to his own detriment. Ann was not worth it. “Does it matter so much?” he temporised. “I was only half serious—”

But because Robin had minded, the truth seemed to matter urgently.

Henry spread both arms across the door. “Remember, Dickon, even when we have taken up arms against him, the King always wins!” he warned, using—in his rare sincerity—his brother’s boyhood name.

But Richard had out-grown submission and bade fair to become a better soldier than any of them. “Well see,” he said, shoving him aside.

For good or ill someone had forgotten to shoot the bolt. It yielded to Richard’s shoulder so that he almost stumbled into the room. And what the two of them saw set an end to all need for speculation. It gave them their fill of truth. By the tall sconces at the foot of the bed stood the King, with Ann of France in his arms.

Filigree fragile she looked against his powerful breast, the torch light making a raven river of her unbound hair. For a full moment of loathing Richard watched her. Her head was flung back in laughter—malicious laughter, at his expense. “But you are clever—clever—to let him go on his old crusade—” As the door swung inwards, letting the chink of light widen to the whole intimate scene, her caressing voice came softly across the bedchamber. And then, suddenly, she was tensely aware of them. Aware of Henry, looking over his brother’s shoulder with a contemptuous sneer. But most horribly aware of Richard, powerful and handsome, with hatred growing in his fierce eyes.

More slowly, warned from his ardour by her unresponsive body, the King himself became aware. He turned and saw them, and his embrace slid from her. “More of your insolence!” he stammered.

“More of your Rosamunds!” shouted Richard hoarsely.

Immobile, each chained by intensity of emotion, they held the moment of stark drama. Richard arrested on the threshold, his hands still clutching the door jamb as if their strength must be restrained from murder; the girl drawing back with trembling fingers pressed to her mouth, her august lover shrunken and silent; Henry, alone unscathed, turned fastidiously from the ugly discovery of his father’s shame. He had always deplored Richard’s passion for the truth.

Of course, it was the woman who invented first. “You must be drunk or crazy, Richard, to speak to your father like that,” she said, trying to draw a tattered dignity about her. “I came to him only for comfort.”

“You looked sad!” jeered Richard, remembering her laughter, and that other sniggering laughter which must have rippled from it down to kitchen, street, and guardroom.

She had the audacity to come to him, warm from his father’s fondling, and try to tempt him back into blindness—and it was not self-protection alone that prompted her. All through her girlhood Richard had been there, casual as any brother, and his preoccupation with masculine affairs had bored her. Never once had she roused passion in him. But now, for the first time, she saw in the blaze of his betrayed anger the kind of lover he might become. All her sex subtlety called her fool, finessing for the flattery of a middle-aged man’s intrigue when ready to hand was an incomparable mate. “You are always so cold to me, Richard,” she accused. “And now I hear rumours that you intend to go crusading. Do you suppose that it means nothing to me that you have not asked me to come with you? To-night—in desperation—I came here to persuade the King to let us marry.”

But Richard, who had come to ask that very thing, pushed her roughly from him. The belated invitation in her eyes made him feel unclean. “I want no man’s leavings on my plate!” he told her.

Seeing the morsel he coveted so spurned stung the King from his confusion. “Only the rashest of your mother’s whelps would dare so far!” he said thickly, the veins swelling at his temples.

But Richard’s rage was beyond caution. “Keep your tongue off of her!” he said. “She is finer than all of us. Fine enough to laugh when you tried to pin on her the poisoning of your other mistress.”

“Be quiet, you fool!” his brother warned.

“Oh, I’ve been fooled all right!” agreed Richard, laughing mirthlessly. Once and for all he would lay this foul thing, and there would be no more hateful secret laughter. “It is Ann—Ann who is young and scheming—who had more cause to poison Rosamund de Clifford,” he accused.

Her pitiful pretence crumbled before his frenzy of disgust. “Send him away! Send him away!” she kept whimpering, cowering with covered eyes.

“He shall go before daylight!” vowed the King, pealing the great bell beside his bed.

That sobered Richard. “Back to Aquitaine?” he asked.

His father laughed harshly. “To plot against me again with Louis and Philip? By our Lady, no! You’re too much your own master there. I’ll have you sent to Navarre—a chivalrous court where you may learn less boorish manners.”

Here in England his turbulent sons were still puppets in his hands. He turned to his table and wrote with bold, angry strokes, and they waited in silence while he set his seal. “Send a messenger with this to Dover immediately,” he ordered, when Gregory came hurrying in. “Tell him to give it to Mercadier, the man in charge of my new castle there. He is to have the Cinque Ports prepare a ship to take the Duke of Aquitaine to Spain.” It was all settled before the sand could run down in the hour glass.

Ann curtseyed low before her royal lover but he gave no sign that he had seen her. She passed between the two brothers on her way to the gallery stairs, and Gregory permitted himself the pleasure of shutting the King’s door with finality behind her. “Better wake one of the grooms and tell him to have horses ready for the coast,” Richard called after him, hating the man for what he must have seen and heard.

“And will you not want a squire and some of the pages to go with you?” suggested Henry.

Richard thought a minute. Knowing how the whole pack of them would be sniggering about this in the morning, he recalled the trustworthy face and sudden smile of the lad who had run so eagerly to hold his horse. “No. I’ll take that new fellow, Blondel de Cahaignes, and no one else,” he decided.

“He is very young, Sir,” pointed out Gregory, with the decorous liberty of an old family servant.

“All the better. He won’t have had time to pick up all the family scandal,” said Richard grimly. “Tell him to pack my gear.”

“Well, anyhow, it must be worth a compulsory change of air to have told that little trollop what you really think of her!” consoled Henry, when he and Richard were alone.

“I am finished with women!” growled Richard.

“You mean, you haven’t yet begun!” rallied Henry, drawing him back to the dying fire. In spite of the curfew he threw on fresh logs and made a cheerful blaze. No English law was going to make him go to bed at dusk like a ploughboy. “You know, Dickon, it may be quite amusing in Navarre,” he prophesied. “They have the best music and dancing and tournaments in Europe. None of our haphazard sort of mêlées. Properly run tournaments with judges who mark each point and all the competitors drawn by lot so that you might get a chance to try those muscles of yours against men like de Barre and the Lusignorts. And you know how well you got on with Sholto when he was here.”

Richard considered the prospect. Sholto, the King of Navarre’s son, had been a good sportsman. There was nothing very exciting happening in England these days, with everything so well ordered and peaceful; and only a wide stretch of sea, he felt, could wash out the foulness of Ann. “I shall see those new crossbows Sholto was always bragging about,” he said, surprised to find himself talking about such trivial things so soon. Of course, if he had loved Ann it would have been different…

“Like Robin’s ingenious cranes, they should come in useful for our Crusade,” Henry was saying, skilfully doctoring the hurt he had caused.

Richard’s thoughts easily projected themselves into the future. After all, life was just beginning and there were plenty of splendid things left. He saw himself cutting a fine figure in the famous lists at Pamplona—impressing experienced knights with his armament plans—leading a conquering army through the gates of Jerusalem. “If only I’d a couple of Arab chargers and a two-handed sword!” he sighed.

Although the Plantagenets had plenty of land and castles, their upbringing, compared with some of the princes of Europe, had been spartan. They lived hard. And Geoffrey had taken some of their best trappings and accoutrements when he married Constance of Brittany and went to rule Anjou.

“Ask young John to lend you that new dagger of his,” suggested Henry.

“I’ll probably look fool enough without it!” laughed Richard ruefully, and looked up to see Johanna standing at the foot of the gallery stairs. The colour was drained from her cheeks, and she had hurriedly thrown a miniver cloak over her bed robe. “Oh, Richard, is it true what Blondel says?” she cried. “That father is sending you to Navarre?”

“Quite true,” he admitted. “He was furious. Our amiable pleasantries are probably already being repeated in the guard-room.”

She threw out her arms in exasperation. “But why did you have to infuriate him
now
? So that you won’t be there to say ‘Goodbye’—when the ship takes me to Sicily?”

Richard regarded her remorsefully. “I am afraid I didn’t stop to think about that. I had just found that bitch Ann in his bedroom.”

“Richard! Will you still have to marry her?”

Richard shrugged the ugly matter aside. “Blondel and I start at dawn,” he said. “So you and I will have to say ‘Good-bye’ now, my sweet.”

“If it hadn’t been for Blondel coming to tell me I should have gone to bed without knowing, and then…” There was a slither of soft slippers across the stone floor as she flung herself into his arms. “Oh, Richard! Richard!” she sobbed brokenly. “If only—the same ship—could take us both!”

Henry wandered to the window and began plucking at the strings of a lute someone had left there, while Richard jerked forward the chair and drew Johanna on to the arm of it. Very gently he stroked the waving bronze of her hair, so identical in colour to his own. “Perhaps one day we
will
sail together on a great warship,” he comforted. “Your old Sicilian is sure to die of apoplexy when he sees you’re a red head, and then I can come and carry you off on my way to Palestine.”

“You always m-make an adventure out of even the h-horridest things,” she sniffed, from the warmth of his comforting arm.

“Every day
is
an adventure for those who choose to meet it so. And my old witch prophesies plenty of excitement for both of us,” he reminded her. “But first, I suppose, we have to win our spurs. You, when you step ashore in a strange country and have to be a credit to us. And I, in the lists of Navarre, when some knight who has fought from end to end of the Holy Land comes charging down on me and my knees are knocking against my poor horse’s ribs with fright, and even the leopards on my shield turn white—”

“Richard,
you’re
not really afraid?”

“Hideously.”

Johanna sat up straight to stare at him in perplexity. “But no one except Robin can beat you at tilting!”

“No one
in England
,” he said. “Though if you must know, Joan, it is not so much the tilting as the dancing that unnerves me. Sancho said they have more formal social occasions in Pamplona.”

“Better teach him that new measure Ann was showing you,” suggested Henry from the window seat.

Johanna slid to those restless feet of hers, her heartbreak momentarily forgotten. “Yes! Yes! How did it go, Henry?” she cried eagerly, picking up the heavy folds of miniver.

In his clear tenor he began to hum an infectious little dance tune, picking out an accompaniment on the lute. Johanna kicked aside the rushes to try over the steps. “Come and try it!” she urged, dragging Richard from his chair; and blunderingly, he let her guide him through the opening movements of a masque.

“Don’t look so solemn about it, man!” laughed Henry, to whom such accomplishments came easily.

“And even if you
don’t
do it very well, you’re so ridiculously good-looking all the ladies of Navarre will want to dance with you,” encouraged Johanna.

“Until all six foot of him lingers on their feet!” laughed Henry.

It was long after curfew, and the servants were coming in from the barns and kitchens to sleep. Before huddling themselves in their cloaks around the hearth, they stood in grinning groups assisting at the lesson. Sometimes they offered criticism, sometimes they applauded. The doings of the young Plantagenets were the high-lights of life to them.