Authors: Norah Lofts
‘From Blondel,’ I said. ‘Why should the cardinal write to me?’ I could hear the asperity in my voice. I felt as though a thousand tiny needles were pricking my skin. Here was Blondel’s voice in my ear, unexpectedly, delightfully, and this fool of a girl interrupting.
‘Let me see. You’re so slow. There might be something.’ She thrust her two letters under my chin and snatched at mine.
‘There could be nothing of interest or importance. Time forbids,’ I said. But I let her take it.
To distract myself I read her letters. That from the cardinal was a succession of fulsome, grateful phrases. I really only noted the part where he mentioned Blondel. ‘The boy,’ he wrote, ‘is delightful. Sending him was a veritable inspiration, for how could Your Highness have known how sadly I miss the music of my own country? At the first opportunity I shall take him to Westminster, in accordance with your gracious suggestion, and let them hear what music should be. Their own is barbarous.’
Blondel’s letter to the woman he loved was short and stilted. The letter any young servant might write—having skill with a pen—to any mistress whom he remembered kindly. He thanked her for the new clothes and the cloak because the weather was colder than she could imagine. For the rest it merely announced his safe arrival and reiterated his desire to serve her to the best of his ability.
While I read the two letters, the one so fulsome, the other so stiff, Berengaria had skimmed through mine and now, thrusting it back at me, she said irritably, ‘What a mass of scribble and not a word of sense in it.’
I tried—I honestly tried—to imagine how I should be feeling if a despatch had come from England and contained no mention of Blondel’s name.
‘It is too soon,’ I said as pleasantly as I could. ‘Have patience. We shall hear. Already the cardinal has accepted your suggestion that Blondel go to Westminster. That is a great stride forward, exactly what we hoped for. News will come.’
‘You are such a comfort to me, Anna,’ she said sweetly. I felt rebuked for the pang of hatred I had felt when she called my letter a mass of scribble. And again rebuked when she said in her remote, dreamy way, ‘I suppose I should go and be agreeable to that young priest.’
Left alone, I read my letter from Blondel.
It is the first letter he ever wrote me; the only memento of him that I have. I carry it with me always and have left instructions that it is to be buried with me.
And every sentence in it is addressed to Berengaria. I suppose he thought it would look strange to send her a long rambling letter, yet the desire to communicate, which is one of the symptoms of love, had made him long to tell her of his experiences and impressions. So he had written to me, interlarding the letter with such phrases as ‘The princess might be interested to know… It would amuse the princess to see…’ Obvious, pitiable device. A mass of scribble!
Maybe, reading it, I should have wept great warm tears of self-pity. Actually I laughed. Only one thing in London, in England, in the world, was of interest to Berengaria and the idea that she might like to know that in England they drank ale instead of wine, that even the burghers’ wives were wearing the new laced gowns and that no one had yet heard even the commonest of Abélard’s songs was amusing.
However, the letter, though not meant for me, brought some comfort. The boy’s mind was akin to mine rather than to Berengaria’s. He was still aware of other things in the world; interested, receptive. His wound would heal now.
Lent came; always a dull, dreary season with the spring taking little steps forward and then halting in the teeth of the east wind; with altars and vestments the colour of sorrow; with too much salt fish at table.
This year the dullness of the season was broken in an unexpected manner. Father, who usually contrived to spend Lent in some place and some pursuit where church ruling did not run overhard, this year cut short his hunting in Grania and returned to Pamplona a fortnight before Easter. He appeared to be in excellent health and good spirits, though about the latter there was a slight overtone of joviality which made me suspect that he was not quite easy in his mind about something. And a well-founded suspicion it was, for we were soon informed that he had cut short his hunting in order to receive Isaac Comnenus’s emissaries—his brother, the Archduke Fernando, and his cousin, the Archbishop of Nicosia. Two such eminent messengers argued the seriousness of the Emperor’s intention, for, as Father said, ‘Short of coming himself, he couldn’t honour us more.’
I began to see trouble ahead. It was something new for Father to speak of a would-be suitor’s showing him honour; he had dismissed several in the past with very scant courtesy. And my doubts increased when Father began to make high politics an excuse for the lavish welcome he planned to offer the Cypriots.
‘With this new crusade ready for launching,’ he said, ‘it is of the utmost importance to promote friendly relationships between the East and the West. An unwitting offence now may have most unfortunate effects later and these fellows have all the Oriental’s regard for pomp and splendour.’
But the crusade had been talked of for quite a long time and ‘these fellows’ hadn’t recently formed a taste for splendour: No! All that had changed was Father’s attitude towards Berengaria’s marriage.
Even Lent was to be disregarded. I made so bold as to remind Father of the season when he began talking about a banquet of venison and suckling pigs, of fresh fish rushed up from San Sebastián on relays of swift horses, of peacocks roasted and then redecked in their plumage.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘these fellows belong to the Eastern Church; their calendar is different. They keep Easter at some other time, if they keep it at all.’ I privately doubted whether the Byzantine calendar differed from the Roman by quite so much but I held my tongue. I was, in fact, a little horrified by the fact that Father could speak about Cyprus as though it were quite outside Christendom and yet be contemplating marrying his darling daughter to its Emperor. After all the years of indulgence, this new attitude seemed suddenly harsh and callous.
‘Have you told Berengaria that you intend to consider Isaac’s offer seriously?’ I asked.
‘No, but I intend to do so and to make my intentions perfectly plain before they arrive. And didn’t I ask you, before I went to Grania, to hint something of the sort to her?’
‘I delayed. We still had some slight hope that the English affair might take a turn.’
‘It has. A turn in our favour too. I heard from Diagos in Rouen. He said that after a visit from Philip of France, Richard had spoken openly of immediate marriage and was planning to go to England almost at once. That suggests a wedding after Easter and that news has hardened my purpose. Now that the Plantagenet is disposed of, the next thing we know she’ll be falling in love with somebody else, probably even more unsuitable. I can’t go through this hoop again, Anna. An unmarried woman of marriageable age is a menace and a nuisance—as the old people knew when they either married their girls at twelve or clapped them into convents.’ That word obviously reminded him of his other daughter. He said quite angrily, ‘I’ve been a fool with my daughters, a weak, sloppy-minded fool and no mistake. And with my son. Here I am, well over fifty, with death looking me in the face and not a grandson to my name. One daughter setting her cap at a man who’s as good as married, another playing catch-as-catch-can with a religious life and you—you dare remind me about Lent. You’re a saucy minx, let me tell you.’
‘But, sire, even Charlemagne permitted liberties to his dwarf!’
He winced a little, as I guessed he would, and went on in a slightly more reasonable tone:
‘You’re saucy, but sometimes I think you’re the only one of my brood with a grain of sense. And you must see that this time I must take a stand. I’ve been patient, I’ve been lenient. I did all I could to get her the man who’d taken her fancy. But now the time has come when we must be sensible. Otherwise, before we know where we are, she’ll be hopping into bed with a handsome young groom or lute player—such things have been known!’
XIII
Even while I hated her there had been things which I was bound to admire about my half-sister. Her beauty, naturally, and her dignity, her sense of what was fitting and seemly and her reserve. But these had been offset by what I can only call a contempt for her character; I had always thought her spoiled and pampered, given to peevishness, indolence and waywardness. I had often looked at her and wondered what manner of person she would have been had she been born as I was.
Now I knew.
For now she found herself in a position where her beauty and rank availed her nothing; in fact, they militated against her. It was because she was beautiful and a princess that Isaac of Cyprus was suing for her hand and it was because she had been pandered to in the past that Father had taken this sudden decision to break her will. She had also to bear the sharp disappointment of hearing Diagos’s message concerning Richard’s imminent marriage.
Nobody could have borne such a shower of blows with more fortitude.
She cried. She cried often and violently but only in the privacy of her own apartment, alone or in my presence. But throughout the ten days of the Cypriot emissaries’ stay in Pamplona she never gave in public any sign of a state of mind that was not assured, composed, serene. And incredibly courageous.
One evening after a banquet of great magnificence, when no one was quite sober the archduke, who was small and fat and swarthy, very much like an upended pig, finely dressed, approached and laid in her lap a most resplendent rope of pearls. It would have reached to the knees when hung about the neck and every pearl was matched and perfect. He made one of his speeches, saying that Isaac had sent them, knowing that they were unworthy to touch the fairest neck in Christendom but hoping that she would, out of kindness, accept them. It was a very awkward moment. Father, who had been expressing himself very freely during the last few days, was within earshot; everybody of any consequence at court was looking on. The archduke was actually on his knees beside her.
She picked up the pearls and ran them slowly, appreciatively, through her, fingers. Then she said:
‘They are beautiful. Very beautiful. Indeed too beautiful and too precious to grace any neck save that of an empress. I pray, Your Highness, preserve them carefully until such day as the Empress of Cyprus may wear them.’ And she bundled the great shining things together and pressed them into the archduke’s hand.
It was not a refusal; it was not a promise. It committed her to nothing.
Alone with me, in the privacy of her own chamber she said, ‘If I had put them over my head, which was his wish, they would have been a halter, like the bit of rope with which goats are dragged to the market!’
‘You evaded the issue beautifully,’ I said. ‘But before they take leave they will demand a plain yes or no. There will come a moment, Berengaria—’
‘But I have said no! To Father. And he can tell them in privacy. I didn’t see why I should say it this evening in the face of them all. He knows that I said I would marry Richard Plantagenet or nobody and if he chooses to play this game with Isaac’s messengers he can’t blame me if I play it too. It would be churlish not to. He knows my mind and I know my mind but since he chooses to be civil, I must be as civil as I can. And despite what Diagos said, you know, Anna, we haven’t yet heard from that boy. Another day gone!’
‘And when we do,’ I said, ‘I am afraid that it will be to the effect that the Knight is to marry the Lady. What then, Berengaria?’
‘I’d sooner die than marry the Emperor of Cyprus or any other man on earth. Father knows that. He just thinks that I can be cajoled, bribed with ropes of pearls and flattering speeches. But he is wrong.’
There came an evening when, after supper, Father sent for Berengaria. We had all eaten together in the great hall and had been, on the surface, very agreeable and merry. After the warm, sweaty, food-laden, wine-heavy atmosphere of the hall, the solar had struck very chill and Pila had offered to brew us a hot posset before we retired and Mathilde was carrying hot bricks from the oven to heat our beds. There was that general feeling of relaxation which comes when people retire to privacy after a public display.
‘Tell His Majesty that I shall present myself in a very short time,’ Berengaria said to the page who brought the message. ‘Pila, you go on with your posset; I’ll drink it before I go. Anna, come with me. Mathilde, fetch the white gown and the gauze wimple. Catherine, my sapphire necklet, if you please. And tell Blanco to get a lantern ready.’
She and I went into the bedchamber.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the moment has come. I have to tell him again. I’ve hoped and prayed—’ She turned suddenly and, clenching her fists, beat hard and furiously against the stones of the wall. ‘Good my God,’ she said in a terrible voice, ‘haven’t I borne enough?’
I took her by the shoulders and swung her round.
‘You’ll ruin your hands. Look, you’ve broken the skin already.’ The blood was indeed starting out in little red beads against the whiteness. She brushed her hands roughly against the stuff of her gown. And then suddenly she relapsed into placidity. She stood like a statue while we brushed her hair and put her into the new dress and arranged the gauzy wimple. When Pila brought in the posset Berengaria said, ‘A stirrup cup, Anna,’ and smiled at me as she drank.
She had never looked so lovely; she never looked so lovely again. The new dress was white and made from a roll of the Damascus silk which our grandfather had brought from the East. Its ground was chalky-white and the pattern of roses shone on it, creamy-white. Her wimple was like a veil of mist. Only the black hair, half shrouded by the wimple, the fresh rose paste on her lips, the blue and black of her eyes and eyelashes and the sapphires about her neck mitigated the whiteness. She looked like a woman made out of marble or snow.
We saw her set off, accompanied by Blanco. We turned back to the fire and drank our possets and warmed our toes. A lively gossip broke out. Pila and Catherine were quite sure that when the princess returned she would be betrothed. Empress of Cyprus.
‘And time, too,’ said Mathilde, going to and fro with the hot bricks. ‘If her mother, God rest her, had lived, my lady would have been married long since.’
‘But it was worth waiting for,’ Pila said comfortably. ‘Empress of Cyprus. That sounds well.’
‘The Emperor is elderly—and fat,’ Catherine said, ‘and he has been married before.’
‘Then he is experienced, easygoing and not too hard to please,’ Lila said.
They chatted on until they were yawning with weariness. ‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘I will await the princess’s return. This is my evening for duty.’
They demurred; they wanted to stay up and congratulate her. But time went on, the posset had been drunk and the fire began to die down. Finally they agreed to go to bed. Mathilde and I were left in the bower.
She was asleep and I was almost dozing when there was a clatter at the door and in ran one of Father’s pages, scarlet-cheeked and breathless from haste. He gasped out that His Majesty wanted me, nobody else, and immediately. ‘He said Your Grace was to come in your night gear if you had retired.’
Mathilde, struggling up out of her slumber, inquired if anything was wrong. When I told her the King had sent for me she said:
‘Ah, they’re drinking to her health and happiness. The pity is that her dear mother shouldn’t have lived to see the day. Drink one cup for me, Your Grace.’
But I had a less comfortable and cheerful view of what might await me. I expected to find Berengaria weeping and Father in a rage.