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CHAPTER EIGHT
Flight
Lucatz was woken from a deep sleep by Perrin, shaking him and whispering urgently, ‘We must leave – now!’
The troubadour started to protest but one look at the joglar’s face told him that this was serious. Muttering and grumbling, he bundled together his instruments and song sheets while Perrin roused the rest of the troupe.
The urgency in the joglar’s voice and the near panic of the joglaresas infected the whole group and they were soon on their way, silently leading the packhorses out of the city gate. It was eerie travelling by night; they headed north, not south towards the ferry point on the river to Arles, since there would be no boats in the hours of darkness. Instead they went in the direction of Beaucaire, aiming for beyond it to the only bridge across the Rhône, at Avignon.
There was no sound but the clinking of the horses’ harness and their shod hooves on the rough road. The troupe travelled all night and arrived in Beaucaire at daylight, tired and, for the most part, completely at a loss as to why they had left Saint-Gilles without even having performed there.
Lucatz bought breakfast for everyone at a tavern and the troupe then rested in a meadow to the north of the city.
‘All right,’ said the troubadour. ‘Now tell me what’s going on. What was that all about? We lost the chance of good money in Saint-Gilles.’
‘We would have lost more than that if we’d stayed,’ said Perrin.
‘By now the city guards will be looking for us,’ said Huguet. ‘At least, they will be looking for a troupe like ours. They knew no names.’
Lucatz sighed. Some joglars could be troublesome, he knew, getting involved in fights, love triangles, theft even. But he’d never had any bother with Perrin and Huguet, and Esteve was too new and too young to cause problems – or so he thought.
‘What did you do?’ he asked. ‘Or is it better if I don’t know? I see no bruises so I assume you weren’t brawling at least.’
‘We neither received nor caused injuries,’ said Perrin. ‘But we did break someone out of prison.’
‘And we had to give him all our money to buy a new horse,’ said Huguet wistfully.
Lucatz looked exasperated.
‘I’m not going to ask any more about it,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling there is something going on here that it is better for me to know nothing about. But tell me why we are on the way to Avignon instead of Arles?’
‘I’m afraid the prisoner was being detained on the Pope’s orders,’ said Perrin. ‘And the further away from Saint-Gilles we can be the better. They will expect us to have taken the ferry or perhaps to have headed back west. But it will be safest if we can carry on travelling east and Avignon is a big town. There will be lots of people there.’
‘And what has happened to this prisoner?’ asked Lucatz. ‘Or is that something else it is better for me not to know?’
‘He is no longer with us,’ said Perrin. ‘And yes, it is better that you know no more than that.’
Lucatz looked at his joglars for a long time. They had never asked anything of him before and he was aware of their connection with the Believers. In the end, he decided to let it go.
‘Was Esteve involved too?’ was all he asked.
The joglars nodded. ‘He and all the joglaresas,’ said Perrin. ‘No one else.’
‘Just the six of you then,’ said Lucatz sarcastically. ‘Ah well, I suppose I should be grateful for small mercies.’
Elinor lay wide awake while all around her the troupe caught up on their lost night of sleep. She didn’t think she would ever forget the rescue of Bertran – or what had happened afterwards.
They had been confident that the jailers wouldn’t discover Bertran’s escape till morning but that left them with only the hours of darkness to get clear of Saint-Gilles. Bertran had stripped off his woman’s disguise, wiping his lips clear of make-up with the bright scarf. Bernardina solemnly handed him back his hat and there was Bertran the troubadour again, as handsome as ever, and free.
‘Thank you all,’ he said softly. ‘I owe you more than I can ever repay. But someone mentioned the Lady Elinor – where is she?’
Elinor had stepped forward so that the light from the cresset by the castle gate shone on her face. Bertran gave a sharp intake of breath.
‘Is it you, lady? I should not have known you.’
‘That was the idea,’ said Perrin. ‘The donzela travels with us as the joglar Esteve.’
‘There is no time to hear that story,’ said Bertran. ‘We must separate without delay. Every minute I spend in your company brings you danger.’
‘Won’t you come with us?’ asked Elinor, heartbroken at the thought of Bertran’s being taken from her so soon when she had only just found him again.
The troubadour shook his head. ‘No. I am an outlaw now. I shall change my clothes, grow a beard and assume a new name. No longer shall I be a poet, able to gain entrance to any court. From now on, I shall be Jules, no more than a spy.’
Then he had remembered his horse. They all decided it would be too dangerous to try to spring the steed out of the castle stable as well as his master from its prison. That was when they had all turned out their pockets. Elinor had gladly given all the money she had earned in Montpellier.
‘Where can you buy a horse at this time of night?’ she asked quietly.
‘I shall take the road to Nîmes,’ he said, ‘and buy a horse in the first village I come to. Some new clothes too.’
For the first hour or so of the night, Bertran’s road was going to be the same as the troupe’s but he had a start on them and they had not overtaken him. Elinor had ridden wearily, feeling as low as she had before leaving Sévignan.
She had found Bertran again only to lose him and now she was tired, fearful and penniless. Her journey east felt pointless; where was she travelling to? Up till now she had been buoyed up by the thought of what she was fleeing from, together with a vague hope of meeting her troubadour.
Then she remembered that she didn’t even have his token any more. A tear trickled down her cheek and she brushed it away with the back of her hand. She felt a pat on her knee. It was Huguet. He was holding out his hand to her, cupping something that winked and glittered in the moonlight: Bertran’s brooch!
‘How . . . ?’ she began to ask but Huguet put his fingers to his lips.
‘Pelegrina,’ he whispered. ‘She picked the young jailer’s pocket before we left.’
Elinor would never have believed that the Catalan would have done something so thoughtful – and now she couldn’t even pay her for it. And all the joglaresas were as penniless as Elinor; they too had contributed all they had to Bertran’s needs.
But it had lightened her heart to have the brooch with the red stone back. Now she lay twisting it in her fingers and thinking of the days when Bertran was no more than a handsome poet and she the simple donzela of the castle, until she too fell asleep.
In Sévignan they had not forgotten the older daughter of the castle. When Lord Lanval had realised she was really gone and apparently by her own will, he set his face into grim acceptance. He knew that he and Elinor’s mother had driven her away by their insistence on a marriage she was opposed to.
Thibaut le Viguier had left the bastide in a bad mood; he had abandoned his own castle for too long and with no reward but the information that he should go home and prepare for war. Blandina was equally disgruntled. She had lost the chance to push Elinor around in her own castle and, by what she had seen at Sévignan, it would have been good sport.
As soon as they were gone, Elinor’s brother Aimeric had volunteered to lead the search for his sister.
‘Don’t worry, Father,’ he said. ‘I’ll be discreet.’
‘Begin with the sister houses,’ said Lanval
. ‘Both the Perfects and the Church’s own convents. She might have taken refuge in one of them.’
‘And if I find her?’
Lanval hesitated. His instincts told him to say ‘Then bring her home, of course!’ But perhaps she would be safer in a religious house?
‘If you find her in a Church convent, leave her there,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But she might not be safe with the Perfects. See if you can persuade her into a convent recognised by the Pope or, failing that, bring her home.’
Aimeric had been gone two months and there had been no word from him. The castellan and his wife had only one child left within their walls.
They hadn’t asked Alys what she knew about Elinor’s disappearance. She was grateful that she didn’t have to tell any lies but secretly hurt that it hadn’t occurred to her parents that she and Elinor might have been close enough for confidences between them.
As the days lengthened and spring turned into summer, Alys felt desperately lonely. She had no one to talk to and no one to ask for news of her sister. And then, months after Lucatz and his troupe had left the castle, some more joglars arrived from the east.
Eagerly, Alys volunteered to serve them refreshments. And it was not long before her questions about a troupe led by a tall, thin troubadour with three joglars and three joglaresas bore fruit.
‘Oc, we saw them,’ said one of the joglars to the others. ‘You remember, in Montpellier? That light-voiced boy who got so much silver from the lady? He sang after our Enric.’
‘Oh,’ said another. ‘The boy who sang the lay of Tristan and Iseut? We weren’t best pleased when they turned up.’
‘Did you hear his name?’ asked Alys. ‘The boy who sang the lay?’
‘Ah, is it your sweetheart then?’ teased one of the joglaresas. ‘He looked too young to have a lady love.’
‘Why, the donzela is not more than a child herself,’ said the first joglar. ‘I think the lad was called Esteve.’
Alys’s heart jumped. It really had been her sister; the plan had worked!
‘Did you hear where they were going next?’ she asked.
‘On to Saint-Gilles, I think,’ said the joglar. ‘East, anyway. That’s one of the reasons we came west. They were a bit too good and we didn’t want the competition.’
She couldn’t tell her parents but Alys hugged the information to herself. Elinor was safe and she was moving away from danger.
All that summer the troupe worked their way east. They travelled on from Avignon up into the Vaucluse mountains, through Sénanque, Forcalquier and Digne. It did not take them long to recoup the cost of Bertran’s new horse, even though there were no more great halls like the castle at Montpellier. There were enough villages and hill towns to fill their purses and Lucatz’s saddlebags. People seemed to need music and song more than ever, as if it might be the last summer when the south was happy. Elinor was astonished by the landscape they travelled through. The mountains were higher than the hills in which she had grown up and as they travelled further east into the Alps they got even higher. And the weather was unusually warm, even for the Midi.
The summer sun beat hot upon them but it was often accompanied by a fierce wind that cooled them on their travels. As they reached the far eastern part of Provensa, the autumn was beginning to draw in and the wind grew colder. Elinor was glad to have her fur-lined cloak with her.
They had been anxious at the beginning of their journey, sure that someone would follow them from Saint-Gilles, unable to believe that they had got away with their risky actions. But as the summer progressed and no one had stopped them on their journey, the troupe relaxed. Even Lucatz, who had taken a long time to recover any sort of good humour after their night flight, had forgiven the joglars for their sudden and ignominious departure.
The trees were changing colour as they entered Saint-Jacques, a prosperous bastide in the lower Alps. Not that there were many trees in this landscape. Sturdy holm oaks were all that withstood the relentless wind.
Saint-Jacques had belonged to a crusader, Lord Jaufre, who had not come back from the disastrous Fourth Crusade in 1204. His lands, his flocks and herds and his castle at the heart of the fortified town, were now all in the hands of his widow, the Lady Iseut.
Her reputation had reached the troupe as they travelled away from Avignon. That she was beautiful and gracious was only to be expected; report never named a lady as anything else. But she was also admired for her learning and her justice. She was a trobairitz, a female troubadour, but not one who wandered from court to court. Iseut de Saint-Jacques was a poet, one who composed her verses sometimes in debate poems, called tensos, with other trobairitz, like the Countess of Provence and Maria de Ventadorn.
‘It would be a good place to winter,’ said Lucatz, gazing up at the strong walls and imposing tower of Saint-Jacques as the troupe approached the town.
‘Thinking of winter already?’ asked Perrin.
‘I’m not as young as I was,’ said the troubadour. ‘And this wind bites through my cloak to my very bones. If the Lady of Saint-Jacques were inclined to give her patronage to a fellow-poet through till spring, I should not demur.’
Elinor looked up too. If Lucatz succeeded, this would be her home for months. A wave of nostalgia swept over her for the castle at Sévignan, its kitchens and its stables, even for the boisterous knights and noiretz who had teased her so. She wondered if she would ever see any of them again.
In mid-September, while Lucatz’s troupe was getting established with the Lady Iseut, the crusade against the Believers was officially called. The Abbot of Cîteaux used his position as both a senior churchman and the Pope’s Legate to make it official at the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order.
But the Pope’s letter six months earlier had already done most of the work; all over the north barons had been counting up the men and arms they could rely on, armour was being repaired, weapons forged and stores calculated.
The northern barons wouldn’t go to war in winter, but it was becoming clear that by the following summer the Pope’s army would be able to mass in force against the south and particularly against Toulouse, whose Count had been responsible for a lot of the trouble.
Bertran was at the Chapter in Cîteaux, disguised as a monk. He wore the white robes and had allowed his hair to be tonsured. He moved through the crowds unnoticed and unrecognised. But when the Chapter was over he cast aside his disguise, clamped a hat over his telltale shaven patch and rode hard for Toulouse.
Count Raimon was an extraordinary man by any standards and Bertran regarded him warily. He had inherited his titles, which included Duke of Narbonne and Marquis of Provence, fourteen years earlier.
Known for his ruthlessness about domestic and dynastic matters, Raimon was hardly likely to be the sort of man that Bertran would admire. Yet he had been a staunch friend of the Believers till now, risking the Pope’s displeasure on more than one occasion. And he was a great defender of the rights of his people to remain free from taxation by the church.
The Count listened to sermons by the Believers and always had at least one Perfect in his retinue. Many of his nobles, his allies and supporters were of that religion. As the Count had protested to Pierre before the murder, no one could have possibly exterminated what were now considered heretical beliefs as thoroughly as the Pope required him to do.
So it was with a mixture of hope and caution that Bertran approached the Count in Toulouse. As Trencavel’s liege lord, the Count also had Bertran’s allegiance and the troubadour had often been at the court in Toulouse. He entered the rose-coloured city through its eastern gate and made his way to the Count’s château. The streets were full of the Count of Toulouse’s coat of arms – a gold cross on a red background, and it made Bertran smile wryly. Would the Count still use it when the barons of the north took up the sign of the Cross to go to war against Toulouse? br />
But at the château he was disappointed; the Count was not there.
‘The Count of Toulouse, Your Majesty,’ announced the footman.
King Philippe-Auguste shifted irritably in his ornate chair. It was the last name he wanted to have announced. He was heartily sick of Raimon of Toulouse, heresy and, well . . . He stopped short at thinking he was sick of the Pope himself, but he could have done without the distraction of another appeal from the south.
‘Show him in, man,’ he said.
Raimon entered, bowing low. He was already an old man at fifty-two and some ten years older than the King, but he was vigorous in mind and body and hopeful of persuading Philippe-Auguste to his side.
‘Your Majesty,’ said Raimon. He had no need of quite so much formal courtesy; Philippe-Auguste was King of France but had no power over the south, whose allegiance was mainly to Pedro of Aragon. But Raimon was on a delicate mission and courtesy hurt no one.
‘To what do I owe the honour of this visit?’ asked the King.
‘It will be no surprise to you, Majesty, that I come about the Pope’s “crusade”, as men are calling it,’ said the Count. ‘He is waging a personal vendetta against me and perhaps against all the nobles in Western Europe. I fear his ambition is growing too great, saving His Holiness.’
‘I have had my own troubles with Rome,’ admitted the King. ‘I’m sure you know the Pope refuses my request to annul my marriage to that Ingeborg who insists she is my queen.’
‘What? Even though Your Majesty has since married the beautiful Agnes?’
The Count was very well aware of the King’s marital problems, which were similar to his own eventful domestic life, and he was banking on the King’s annoyance with the Pope to get him to forbid the crusade to the south.
‘Even so,’ said the King, brooding on the injustice. ‘Ingeborg insists the marriage was consummated and the Pope chooses to believe an ignorant girl over an experienced widower and father like myself.’