The Lute Player

  What happened was quite otherwise. The next news we had of Richard informed us that he had moved against the rebels who had taken refuge in Nottingham Castle and had been successful in reducing them. John at the last took refuge behind Eleanor’s skirts and, led by her hand, came to the presence of the brother he had betrayed and tried to supplant. I could imagine Eleanor’s state of mind: Of all my beautiful boys, only two remain and it is for me, their mother, to make peace between them. Sentimentalism is apparently an ailment from which all human beings suffer sooner or later. She had avoided it in her youth and it had overtaken her in her dotage.

  Richard said, ‘I forgive you, John, and I wish I could as easily forget your offence as you will my pardon.’ I could have warmed towards him for that speech, so nicely turned, generous, witty and shrewd; but the tale reached us together with the information that he was being crowned afresh at Westminster to wash out the stain and shame of his imprisonment.

  He could so easily have sent for Berengaria to share that coronation; he could have washed out deeper stains, darker shames. But he did not.

  Berengaria received this new rebuff quietly. But it was a buffet on a bruise and my heart ached for her. When next she spoke of L’Espan I was only too glad to humour her.

  VIII

  We went back to the cramped lodgings at the end of the bishop’s house and began riding out in the brightening spring days to choose the place where our house should stand. We set our hearts on a site that lay on a gentle slope with the birch forest running down towards it and the shining Loire at its feet; the hill and the forest protected it from the north wind and the small but very substantial castle of Sir Godric L’Espan stood guard over the valley. In less than a fortnight the tentative, vague idea had hardened into a determination. Whatever the cost, it was well worth it to have something to talk about, some common interest; and Berengaria, riding out in the air, sitting on a stump to eat a snack at noonday, looked healthier and happier than she had since the day when we set out from Pamplona. Women really did need something to take their minds off themselves and their men, I decided; and perhaps that was why God gave so many of them so many children.

  Deciding the site was interesting and easy. Getting possession of it was very difficult. All the land for miles around belonged to Sir Godric and he was unwilling to sell an inch of it, particularly to Berengaria. He was a coarse, jovial, literate man but very shrewd. Manifestly there was something queer—to his thinking—in a queen running helter skelter about the countryside trying to buy land on which to build a house. Rightly speaking, every castle and every manor house and every bit of land belonged to her—or at least to the King—and if she couldn’t find a suitable place of residence ready made for her, well, that was a pity and His Majesty should do something about it. He, Godric, wasn’t going to encourage any such runagate scheme and find himself in trouble. Asked directly what trouble he imagined could result from such action he had no answer; it was just that the scheme was unheard of and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

  ‘Well,’ I asked at last, ‘what about me? Am I allowed to buy a patch of land and build myself a house?’

  That, he said, was a little more canny but still outrageous. He wasn’t in favour of the idea at all. Pressed, he promised to think about it.

  A fortnight passed and then one morning I received a present of venison from Sir Godric—just a quarter of venison with a formal message and no word about the land. I took that as a sign of a negative decision and said to Berengaria, ‘This is asking for bread and receiving a stone—but reversed. I think we must abandon the idea of L’Espan.’

  Two days later, before we had had time to settle on an alternative plan, Sir Godric called on us. At least the page announced that he was waiting without and asking to see me. Berengaria cried:

  ‘He has come to say yes. Bring him to me at once.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if the frailest chance remains, the less you enter into it, the better. And if he has come to say no, it will embarrass him less to say it to me. You stay here.’

  I went out to the odd little chamber which served us as anteroom, sent the pages skipping and prepared to listen to what Godric had to say. He appeared to be very ill at ease, fidgeting about with a little switch he had in his hand and now and again striking himself quite a sizable blow, either on the hand or the leg.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this business. I can see no real reason why you shouldn’t build there, Your Grace, but the terms of the bargain I wish to make may not be acceptable to you.’

  An attempt to raise the price.

  ‘Oh,’ I said noncommittally. ‘And what are your terms, Sir Godric?’

  ‘I suppose you have heard the news. The King has declared war on the King of France and has called for all true men. I shall keep Easter in Normandy, Your Grace.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said again and added the polite word, ‘I hope it will be a short campaign and successful.’

  ‘If God so wills it.’ Then with a change of voice, ‘My brother-in-law is taking charge of my castle and my estate and my family; he was wounded at Jaffa and never fully mended. He will not ride out again.’

  ‘A convenient arrangement,’ I said. He was not a man to waste words and doubtless these irrelevancies were going to knit into some pattern presently. I waited.

  ‘I should leave with an easier mind if you and I could come to some arrangement, Your Grace.’

  ‘And we should reach such an arrangement more speedily if you would tell me what you have in mind,’ I said a trifle sharply.

  He struck himself two stinging blows.

  ‘It is about my sister and her daughter,’ he said with the air of someone about to ford an unfamiliar stream. ‘To put it plainly, there are too many bitches in my kennel. Giselda’s husband died of fever at Acre and Châteauroux passed to her nephew, so she came to make her home with me. Unfortunately my lady and she cannot agree on so small a matter as to whether a fire needs another log or not. That is the very truth.’ He paused and looked at me, begging me to believe this seemingly incredible statement which I, who had lived with so many women, could believe only too easily. ‘I might perhaps leave them to their quarrels—but there is that other child. You have seen my niece Jehane?’ I had, once. A born idiot, all drooling mouth and eyes like a frog’s.

  ‘A mother,’ said Godric miserably, ‘has feelings no other can share and when my lady—patience exhausted, as is understandably—whips Jehane, my sister is moved to retaliate. Last Thursday sennight they inflicted really grievous wounds on one another. I, of course,’ he said with some pride, ‘can see both sides of the matter and I can control them. But my brother-in-law, being my lady’s blood brother and very like her in temper, will certainly side with her. And when I was I little boy’—he raised his head suddenly and spoke more freely, moved by a memory—‘when I was a little boy I had no mother and my father was a man of great ferocity. Giselda, my sister—she was two years older, big and strong even then and of intrepid courage—would spring to my defence like a cat with kittens. One does not forget these things, Lady Anna. And now when Giselda defends Jehane, yea, even though it be against my own lady wife, I think: Even so did she defend me in days past! I shall not be happy in Normandy at the war if I think that Jehane is being whipped and put in the dungeons and my sister helpless…’

  He looked at me and his eyes, which were ordinarily shrewd and bright—I had thought when we were bargaining that they were very like the eyes of a rat in a tallow barrel—were eloquent and clouded with misery. And appealing—as even a rat’s eyes can be when it finds itself trapped. But what was I supposed to say or do to deliver him? Enlightenment soon came.

  ‘I will give you the land,’ he said quickly. ‘I will send up every serf at my command to clear and level the place. I will hire skilled workmen from Le Mans. And when you are housed there I will see that milk and eggs and flesh and fowl are sent regularly—if only you will invite Giselda and Jehane to live with
you. Giselda is a skilled housewife—the best I know, though I dare not say so at home; she can brew and bake, make soap and candles; she can spin and weave and embroider and can play many games and knows many songs and stories by rote. And the child is not vicious. Ugly and stupid, yes, and of course she kicks and bites when she is beaten; but, treated kindly, she is like a dog, a lame-brained but faithful dog. She knows me, she knows I am her friend and she brings me my boots; nobody at L’Espan dares touch my boots if she is free. You know, Your Grace, there is a saying, “God makes the rules, the Pope makes the dispensations, but the Devil makes the children.” I think of that whenever I look on that child. Giselda’s husband was her cousin—he was her half-brother, too, when the whole truth was told—but as I said, my father was a man of great ferocity. We couldn’t—So there they are. A horse lame beyond cure or a hound toothless with age one can despatch in the name of mercy but an unwanted woman and an idiot child are not so easily disposed of.’

  ‘There are nunneries.’

  ‘That is true. With rules which the little one could never mind. Or if it is an easy place, like Angers, then it is no better than a whore house. And, at Blois the abbess is the woman who wanted to marry, who should have married Châteauroux; she would persecute Giselda. Oh, I should be so much happier about them, so much easier in my mind if you—’

  ‘Why not build them a house yourself?’

  His florid face went quite pale.

  ‘With room to spare at the castle—for there is room; it is not a question of room—why, my lady would—No, that would be the worst thing…’

  I allowed my mind one moment’s diversion. I had seen Godric’s wife. She was half his size and certainly no more than a third of his weight; her face was the colour of a candle and as flat as a dish. And he was obviously terrified of her. How did some women manage to attain such ascendancy?

  ‘But if I could say,’ he went on doggedly, ‘that you—and Her Majesty, of course’—he skirted that uncomfortable patch of ground quickly—‘had invited Giselda, I could say it was because of her housekeeping.’ And thereby, I thought, score a final triumph in a war of attrition that has gone on ever since Giselda came to the castle and said, “I always hang a hare four days or stuff a duck this way or bleach linen thus…” Oh, I could see it all. And that drooling idiot face.

  Yet I was sorry for him. Stripped of his possessions he is just a simplehearted, kind man; he remembered a past kindness, was torn between two loyalties. And he was going to a war whose causes concerned him very little. There would be arrows to pierce his eyes and jaw and vitals; axes to mutilate his limbs; the many sicknesses which most sedulously waited upon every army ready to lay him low.

  So I answered him kindly—far more kindly than he had answered me when I first sought a favour of him.

  ‘You realize that in this matter I am not sole arbiter? But the Queen and I will talk the matter over. This very evening. I will let you know.’

  To my astonishment Berengaria took kindly to the idea of housing Giselda and her idiot child.

  ‘When we have a house we shall need some kind of chatelaine,’ she said.

  ‘There’s the idiot, remember,’ I pointed out ruthlessly. Ugly as she was, I could regard the little girl without much repugnance but I preferred to voice myself, beforehand, the complaint which might so easily be made by Berengaria too late.

  ‘We could arrange not to see her very often. We should have our own apartments.’

  We talked the matter over for the whole of an evening.

  ‘And suppose, Anna—this is just supposing—but suppose at some time Richard did wake up to a sense of duty and wish to install me, say, in London and you did not wish to accompany me. It would be nice for you not to be alone.’

  ‘If that should happen—and if you wish it, Berengaria, God grant you your wish—I shouldn’t stay, either alone or with Godric’s castaways, in L’Espan.’ I almost added that I should be off to Apieta like an arrow from a bow but I feared to evoke her self-reproachful mood.

  As it was, she looked stricken and began, ‘Oh, Anna, I’ve—’

  I forestalled that by blurting out immediately another thought which had struck me suddenly:

  ‘Truth to tell, this might be from that point of view a good arrangement. We have all the amusement and the interest of building without the responsibility of full ownership; and if we ever did want to leave we could simply leave it to Giselda. Godric merely looks for an excuse to get his sister out of his wife’s clutches and safely installed. He wouldn’t mind whether we were there or not.’

  ‘And I would like the house to be at L’Espan.’

  Born of pity and boredom, L’Espan was nurtured on pity, expediency and obstinacy.

  I saw Sir Godric again and we were very frank with each other.

  ‘Now,’ I said when I had told him that we considered the proposition favourable, ‘whose house is this to be? For me it is an experiment; I’ve always wanted to build a house and this is a trial of my skill. To the Queen it is an amusement, a change from tapestry work; to your sister, it is a place of refuge. But since you would not sell the land, it remains in a sense your property. Suppose, then, I wish to sink a well or even make a fountain, are you likely to say, “Not there, here!” Or will your sister wish to put a sage bed where I desire a lavender hedge? Because if so, I warn you, my interest would very quickly wither. My first plan has been so twisted out of shape that I already regard it coldly. It is better,’ I said, ‘to speak bluntly now.’

  ‘It must be your house,’ he said quite solemnly. ‘If Giselda guessed that I had done this for her she would fling the fact into my lady’s face, as urchins fling mud—not’, he added hastily, ‘that Giselda is ill-natured but she has suffered much.’ His eyes suddenly admitted a twinkle that I found endearing. ‘Suffering sweetens the natures of saints, Your Grace, at least so we are told, but for the rest of us—’

  And I reeled back as though from a blow, struck by the thought that Berengaria had been sweetened by suffering. It was terribly true.

  Suppose I had been present at the making of a saint!

  What rubbish! I thought and braced myself to talk stern business with Sir Godric.

  IX

  Blondel came back when the site had been cleared and levelled, the foundations laid, the walls reared to about the height of my girdle.

  It had been a beautiful early spring day. Under the birch trees at L’Espan the dog violets and the primroses had woven a carpet lovelier than any from Ispahan. I had had what for me was a happy day. I had ridden out to the site, eaten my noonday piece sitting on a stump in the sun and listened to the overseer’s story of his son, the clever little boy who had wormed his way into the choir school at Le Mans, taken priest’s orders, been appointed secretary to the Bishop of Nantes. A pleasant story, humble love and earnest prayers culminating in worldly success. ‘And never forgetful of his parents,’ the old man said. And I had said, ‘I can see where he gets his brains, the way in which you managed…’ I flattered him shamelessly.

  On the whole, a very pleasant day.

  Berengaria had stayed at home. It was no good; the work—people just couldn’t accept and ignore her. She was the Queen. They stopped work to stare at her. They were horrified if it looked likely that she would soil her shoes. She had thrown her whole heart and mind for the moment into the matter of building and one day, with my roughly drawn plan in her hand, she had halted by a fellow as he dug and said, ‘And this is to be my room?’ in a tone of bright interest. And he had gone distraught and tried to kiss her feet and said that no room was good enough and that by rights… Oh, on and on he went, carried away, earnestly and well-meaningly saying terrible things. Me, after a brief spell of curiosity, astonishment and faint disapproval, they could accept as in the end everybody accepted me; shapeless, sexless, I could hobble and stumble where I pleased. Now and again a man would halt his pick or shovel and reach out a rough kind hand to help me over a difficult place but here, as
in Pamplona, in Acre, in Rome, my affliction made me free.

  It also made me very tired. Jogging home, I thought I would have my supper brought to my bed and I would have a candle and lie and read a book which the bishop in his kindness had lent me yesterday. And I would be spared the effort of making conversation with Berengaria. From that my mind slid off to contemplate the future. I had by this time seen and talked to Godric’s sister, Giselda, and found her a sensible, accomplished creature, suffering from cramp of mind and body, like a big dog chained to too small a kennel. You could almost see her shake and stretch herself. You could see, too, that she was all ready to adore Berengaria, to wait upon her hand and foot, to pamper every whim. I could imagine them working endless tapestries together, Giselda trying on Berengaria all her dainty little dishes, her nourishing possets, her well-regarded recipes.

  I should be free again if things worked out well. Free. And lonely. What of that? Loneliness was freedom’s other face. In all my life I had only seen one person with whom I wanted to share it and even that mild wanting had brought a forecast of the weight of the chains.

  I dismounted and stumbled stiffly into our living apartment; and there, in a room where the candles were brighter than usual and the newly lighted fire clearer, was Blondel sitting close to Berengaria, busy with what she would once have called “a mess of scribble.” She looked up and said:

  ‘Anna, Blondel has solved the kitchen problem. We have to dig as though we were making a dungeon but a wider hole so that light and air can get in from the empty space in front. Show her, Blondel, show her what you have devised…’

  Over the neatly drawn sketch of an underground kitchen with an underground forecourt outside its door, Blondel’s eyes met mine. Loneliness receded before that look. So, more reluctantly, did freedom.