Authors: Norah Lofts
‘And, Anna—’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you be so very kind as to tell the boy? Not too much, if that can be avoided. I should feel awkward. He’s so insolent in a smooth way. It’s my fault, I know. On account of the dream I’ve rather spoiled him. This afternoon, for instance, I was right about that letter and I ought to have smacked his head when he called me ignorant. But I thought, He isn’t bonded, he might run away. So I held my hand. And what a mercy I did! Oh, Anna…’
I was rather afraid that she might kiss me again, so I moved away and said with sincerity, if with a feeling of guilt:
‘I do hope something will come of it, Berengaria. We mustn’t hope for too much.’
‘Just to know, even the worst, would be a relief. If I knew beyond all hope and doubt that Richard was going to marry Alys, I could lie down on that bed and die!’
I could have said, ‘And that isn’t so easy!’ When I was thirteen and first realised the full meaning of my deformity—that it wasn’t just a matter of being awkward on stairs, easily tired, unable to hunt—when I knew that it meant being ugly forever, that no man would marry me, that I should have no children—then, and for a long time afterwards, I had often had fits of depression when I had cast myself on my bed and longed, prayed to die. I’d lain on my bed and sobbed and writhed and sweated but I hadn’t died! I had just become old. At sixteen I had reached the state which most women attain when they are forty, winkled, grey, and past childbearing. There are blighted peaches and pears like me, spotted, ripe before the main crop and lying rotting at the foot of the tree while the others mature in beauty. I had sometimes, by a morbid fancy, taken up such a one, bitten into its good side. Not all wasted.
Well, if I could save Blondel from the bower, from Berengaria, from himself, I should not have been all wasted either.
X
A little snow fell that night and when we woke the bright, unreal reflected light filled every apartment. It was bitterly cold but the sun was shining in a sky the colour of wild hyacinths.
Berengaria started the day by bidding Catherine fetch out the heavy little ironbound box in which she kept her jewels.
‘We’ll find the ring and you’ll write the letter to accompany it, won’t you, Anna?’ she said, giving me a significant look.
‘All in good time,’ I replied, returning the look. ‘First I’m going out to look at the snow. You’ve never seen Pamplona under the snow, Blondel. If you’d like to come with me I’ll show you from my special place of vantage.’
We climbed to the place from which I ordinarily watched the joustings. The tourney field lay smooth and untrodden at our feet and beyond the outer wall were the huddled roofs of all the little houses glistening white in the sunshine. It was quite magical and for a while we stood in silence, just staring with wonder that was almost childlike.
‘It is beautiful,’ he said at last. ‘I’m glad that you brought me out. And now, hadn’t we better go back? It’s rather cold for you.’
‘I really brought you out because I have something to tell you,’ I said. ‘We’ll find a more sheltered spot.’
We moved around to the south side of the Roman Tower and found a place in the sun, sheltered from the cold wind that came from the mountains—the wind which had brought us the snow—for here so little had fallen that it was no more than a sprinkling. I brushed a clear space and sat down, pulling my cloak closely about me. We were sitting in one of those breaks in the wall designed so that anyone defending the castle could shoot arrows, drop stones or pour boiling oil or water upon his enemies and then dart back behind the covering wall and the space was just wide enough for our two bodies. I was nearer to him than I had ever been before. I looked at him and in the bright light saw that the laughter marks about his eyes had given way to others not graved by merriment and that there were now some silver hairs amongst the gold on his head.
I remembered seeing similar signs of premature age in a young man, a young knight whom Father had brought home with him from one of his little wars. He had been wounded in the chest and the wound would not heal. He’d been patient at first, submitted to invalid regime and Ahbeg’s ministrations, and then rebelled. The wound was hidden when he was clothed and for about four months he went about pretending that there was nothing the matter with him. But his hair, which had been black to begin with, whitened every day and his face, in the end, was the face of an old man. One day, dismounting from his horse at the end of a day’s hunting, he had given a groan and dropped dead.
He had been buried and forgotten for fully five years but now I remembered him, his look of defiant endurance and the way he had aged in four months. I had marked him much at the time because I was in a morbid state of mind myself.
He had walked about devoured by a suppurating wound; Blondel was devoured by hopeless love. And so was I. Was the sign set on me too?
‘You are hesitating about what you have to tell me,’ the boy said. ‘After my rudeness yesterday I shall not be surprised, you know, to hear that the princess can dispense with my services.’
He grinned at me quite cheerily.
‘It hasn’t anything to do with that at all. The fact is, the princess has an errand which you can do better than anyone else. In London. And rather a curious errand.’
Interest woke in his face.
She had told me to tell him as little as possible but he must be told exactly what we wanted to know. I told him, making it all sound rather more official and conventional than it was, saying, ‘We are wondering… we are mystified…’ I knew that anybody but a fool would understand who was interested and why and the boy was no fool. He understood.
But even as he accepted the errand his face went white and the lines in it deepened; my heart turned over in my breast with pity and the desire to comfort him.
And then I thought, as in moments of emotion I rather tend to do: How utterly ridiculous this all is. Here is a nameless, landless strolling player suffering the agonies of hell for love of a princess; and here is a woman, completely unlovable but a king’s daughter and a duchess, suffering the same agonies for love of this same lute player.
‘You know, Blondel,’ I said, ‘sometimes it seems to me that we are born and live our lives in order to make sport for the gods. Not the one great God but all the lesser ones. Consider Berengaria! So beautiful, so eligible, that in the twelve weeks she spent with her aunt Lucia in Rome fifteen young nobles made offers for her hand. Most of them were ineligible in the strict sense of the term but no matter. I’ve lost count of the eligible offers she has received. Crowns roll at her feet like skittles. But the one man to whom she takes a fancy is this man, already plighted. You’d think that alone would satisfy the gods—but no! She must be further tormented by the fact that, though plighted, he remains unwed. And while this goes on every woman who sees her thinks, Oh, to have such hair; oh, to have such eyes; oh, to be so beautiful! That is what the gods laugh about.’
And what sport we are making for them at this moment, I thought. But I have saved you, if you will consent to be saved. Once you are out of this place, the enchantment will wane. There’ll be a girl, straight-backed, round-breasted—and one day you’ll say, ‘There was once in Pamplona a lovely princess…’ Me you will not remember at all, save as an example of the horrible shape to which the human body can be twisted. Yet twice I have manipulated the strings of your life. I put you into a cage—and I have set you free.
He said, ‘If there is anything to be discovered I will discover it. Will you tell her that? And if there is anything to be done, I will do it.’
I felt the same peculiar thrill, that movement of the flesh against the bone that I have sometimes felt when watching young men take the vows of knighthood. The simple words had that same solemn ring.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘don’t forget to enjoy yourself at the same time. England could be very interesting, especially if you get to Westminster. There’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, for instance. She rebelled against her husband and tried to make her son independent in Aquitaine. They say she’s in prison somewhere. And all these stories about Fair Rosamonde… For a minstrel and a song maker a visit to England should be an interesting experience.’
We had to climb down from the battlement and he went before me, his arm stretched up, his hand cupped about my elbow. For the last time!
At that point I realised what I had done. Self-pity washed me. I completed the descent in silence.
XI
The preparations for his departure occupied three days. Berengaria, looking at him for the first time with complete awareness and seeing not just the face out of her drugged dream but the whole person, said that he must have new clothes. As he stood, she said, he would do her little credit. So a tailor was summoned.
I added to the new suit and the cloak which was ordered a pair of shoes and a pouch into which I put ten gold pieces.
‘You planned my house,’ I said, ‘and I should have paid so much to anyone else and probably for a worse drawing. This is no more than your due.’
He and Berengaria and I were in the inner room together. We were arranging the method by which any information he gleaned should be sent back.
Remembering the episodes of the battle-axe and the rush-chewing fit, I was prepared to believe that the secret, when unearthed, might prove dark and scandalous. So we invented a code. Blondel was to send us back a song; Alys was to be the Lady; Richard, the Knight; the Dragon was to mean King Henry; the King, Philip of France; the Crone, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Blondel and I were both sunk in depths of secret misery and even Berengaria at this moment lost heart. And our misery took the form of a crazy hilarity, so that we vied with one another in inventing the most scandalous secrets about the English court and putting them into innocent-sounding rhymes.
Presently Pila put her head round the door and announced that supper was ready.
My heart climbed out of my chest and resumed its beating in my throat. I wanted a moment alone with him—he would be off at first light in the morning—but I knew that he would want to take his leave of Berengaria. His need. My need.
I stood up and stretched out my hand. ‘Good-bye, Blondel, and may God speed you.’
‘And may He keep Your Grace,’ he said. Our hands met and touched and fell apart.
But in the morning I rose stealthily from amongst the sleeping women and climbed in the dawn-dusk to a point where the battlements overlooked the road he must take to the port of San Sebastian. And presently I saw him in his new blue cloak, with his wrapped lute and his little bundle strapped to his saddle, ride clattering out, accompanied by the groom who was to bring his horse.
At the point where the road turned he checked and looked back for a moment. Once again the castle looked stark and black against the red sky but it was the red of the sun’s rising this time; a good omen.
I remembered then that in all the talk and the planning there had been no word said by any one of us concerning his return. Neither I nor Berengaria had said, ‘When you come back…’; he had never said, ‘When I come back…’ His going fulfilled her poppyhead dream, perfected my plan for his release and doubtless chimed with the secret wishes of his own heart. He would not come back.
So go, I thought, looking my last on him, get away, be free; go and meet your ordinary young man’s life. And God send you happy!
The horse moved on; the turn of the road hid him. Presently I was calm enough to climb down and take up my pretence at living again.
XII
The first news came from him far sooner than any sane person could have expected, though in the short interval Berengaria had almost driven me mad with her impatience. Every morning without fail she had said, ‘Perhaps we shall hear today,’ and every evening she had gone to her bed disappointed. It had taken every modicum of patience I possessed to say, ‘He is still on the ship, Berengaria’—and I saw the ship, a prey to wind and wave; or ‘He has only just landed’—and I saw dangerous, robber-infested roads.
So the days passed until the morning came when I could honestly say, ‘Yes, with any luck he should now have arrived and perhaps been presented to Westminster but we must allow at least ten days more.’ Late that afternoon a thin, pale cleric shaken by a terrible cough came to the castle and sought an audience with the princess. He came from England, from Cardinal Saturnino. He explained, coughing the while, that the climate in England had affected his lungs and that the cardinal, a humane man, had sent him home to recuperate and had entrusted him with despatches.
Poor young man, so courteous, so travel-weary, so glad to be back in Navarre, how shabbily we treated him: hardly listening to his greetings, snatching his packet of letters and retreating to the inner room, leaving Pila to perform the offices of hospitality.
The package was bound with thread and sealed. As Berengaria set about tearing it open, like a starved animal with a parcel of food, I felt bound to say warningly, ‘This cannot tell you anything you wish to know. The boy can but have arrived. You’ll find nothing there save a letter of thanks for the ring.’
She severed the thread with her teeth, unheeding, and when it broke cast away the outer wrapping with the seals. Inside there were three letters, two slim ones for her, one, stouter, for me. She held out mine without lifting her eyes from her own.
I opened mine gently:
his
fingers had folded it; I had recognised his writing at a glance. And as soon as the page was unfolded I had seen that this was no ballad written in code but a long, straightforward letter. I was amazed, touched, flattered and excited all at once. But I had scarcely read the opening words of greeting when Berengaria slapped her two sheets together and exclaimed in a voice of intense disappointment, ‘You were right, no news of any kind. See for yourself. What does yours say? Is it from His Eminence or from the boy?’