Authors: Norah Lofts
Within a week Richard sickened. In Palestine he had, like almost all crusaders, fallen victim to that recurrent fever which never completely relaxed its hold, the fever which meant a day of aches and pains, a day of sweating and shivering, a day of weakness—the routine illness which many returned crusaders casually referred to as “my three bad days.” But three days passed, seven, ten. Doctors gathered like vultures but not one could alleviate or even name the ailment.
The cavalcade, sent to fetch the queen to the bedside of her husband, arrived at L’Espan at four o’clock on a beautiful summer’s morning. At that hour the birds wake and greet the first light of dawn and go to sleep again and at L’Espan I always woke and heard them. On this morning through the bird noises I heard the creak of leather, the clatter of hooves, the voices of men, subdued yet urgent in the enormous silence of the dawn. I was the one to wake her and say, ‘He has sent for you.’
The moment had come. In Pamplona, in Brindisi, in Messina, in Cyprus, in Acre, in Le Mans, in Rouen and in L’Espan she had waited, been desperate, impatient, angry, resigned, proud, defiant, patient. Now the moment had come. By six o’clock, with the sun rising on a dew-drenched, flower-hung, bird-enchanted world, she had gone, so happy, so entirely fulfilled and justified, that it was awesome.
‘Well,’ I said, turning back into the house, ignoring the gibbering Jehane who hung upon my arm and speaking to Blondel who walked on my other side, ‘they say in Navarre, “You come at last to the place where your heart is.” God send her a good arrival.’
‘You do,’ he said, ‘if you set your heart in a possible place.
He
would have looked like that if he had ever entered Jerusalem.’
‘’Rusalem,’ said the idiot, who was given to such senseless, broken repetitions.
XII
There were now seven women—eight, if one reckons Jehane—living under L’Espan’s sprawling roof and building was still going forward. There were times when I looked at the place, or merely thought about it as I lay on my bed, and felt like someone who mounts a gentle old palfrey in order to ride a mile and is no sooner in the saddle than the mount is transformed into a rearing, half-broken stallion which takes the bit between its teeth and gallops for twenty miles over hill, over dale in quite a different direction.
Perhaps, in quiet intervals between battles, Sir Godric boasted about the clever arrangement he had made for his sister or perhaps his lady talked of the way in which she had been relieved of the burden of her sister-in-law; or perhaps Giselda’s friends rejoiced over her happy fate. I only know that somehow or other the idea that L’Espan was a place for unwanted women spread all over Maine and we were overwhelmed by pitiable requests.
The fate which had made me physically so pitiable and in almost every other way so very enviable had also made me prone to something which at its best was the virtue of compassion, at its worst the deadly sin of pride. I had never deluded myself about my motives, not even in the far-back days when I fed the beggars in Pamplona. I knew why I was sorry for the afflicted and I knew how I felt when I could render aid. There, but for my better fortune, go I, I would think, recognising the taint; and see, I am as I am but just look what I can do, I would think.
And all these women appealed both to my pity and my arrogance. Not because they were misshapen, not because they were invariably poor, but because they had never had a place or, having had one, lost it in a world, in a framework of society which pairs off men and women and decrees that without a man a woman is little more than a piece of rubbish while at the same time nature and war and morality issue their entirely conflicting decrees, that more infant girls survive and that women outlive men, that men shall be killed and women spared, that no man can have more than one wife. God, I often thought, either didn’t intend every woman to have a husband or He was no believer in monogamy. Sometimes it seemed to me that the Saracen way, where a man could have as many wives as he could support, was more merciful and the Jewish way, where widows were regarded as a family responsibility, was more moral than the Christian way which perpetually forced two groups of women, the unmarried and the widowed, onto the rubbish heap.
It was not, as most pitiable situations are, the result of poverty; poor women can work and, married or single, can enjoy the fruits of their labour. In every case where we were asked to house, to invite, to shelter a woman there was some man—brother, father, son, nephew—willing to make a monetary contribution; he just wanted to get rid of the woman—of a sister because he was about to get married or a mother because she quarrelled with the wife about the children, of the daughter because she would never find a husband now and it was a man’s duty to see his daughter settled. Space and security were what was lacking. One woman—she was Thérèse, sister of the Count of Thouars—arrived at L’Espan with a wooden casket of jewels worth nine hundred marks under one arm and a small wheezy dog under the other. ‘These were my mother’s and are rightly mine,’ she said, giving me the box, ‘and if I can stay here instead of going to Blois, where dogs are forbidden, I’ll give them up gladly. The stones will glitter for anyone; my little dog knows me and loves me.’
Oh, the thwarted affection in that speech! And the misplaced trust, I thought. What was to prevent my taking her jewels and turning her into the woods?
They were all very trustful and the unmarried ones especially, most significantly ignorant of money, hardly knowing a mark from a groat. They had never had any of their own to handle.
Berengaria, who had once lived in a world of her own, remote and unassailable, now that that world had crumbled and rotted, was inclined to take an almost frenzied interest in anything which would keep her mind off Richard and her own peculiar situation. And the women offered more distraction than the birds and the bees, the butterflies, the flowers.
I was naturally vulnerable to appeals to my pity and pride.
Blondel was more often sober when there was work on hand.
So the young L’Espan drew further nourishment from a queen’s despair and a drunkard’s drunkenness.
But that grain of mustard seed in the Bible story which grew until it sheltered all the birds of the air—we are not told through what richly rotten, what chance-dunged soil it spread its roots.
I found myself entangled with the complicated, fascinating and sometimes distracting question of finances.
Often—but even more frequently after Berengaria had gone—I would stop the busy, busy, busy, look, see, notice, taste, listen roundabout and think about Apieta. Suppose I left this house of mine which was not and never had been and could never be
my
house. What would happen to them all?
I began very seriously to turn my mind to the problems of name and administration through that summer after Berengaria joined Richard. And I received help from an unexpected quarter; from none other than Blanche. If anyone had ever told me that I should seek advice and get it from that silly, vacillating girl who had tried for years to flirt with men
and
with Holy Church, I should have laughed and dubbed him fool. But so it was.
Blanche had married quite suddenly and, considering her age, quite well. And she seemed likely to make Thibaut of Champagne a good wife. But she had not, after some months of marriage, quickened and early in the spring she decided to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Petronella at Le Mans. St. Petronella was a virgin but she had the reputation for curing sterility and there was a deep groove worn by the feet of anxious childless women about her resting place; and at all seasons of the year there were little posies on her tomb, many anonymous but many others labelled, “With gratitude for Geoffrey,” “Because of Guillaume,” “St. Petronella sent John to me.” (Presumably some girls forced open the stubborn wombs but they were regarded more as a promise than an achievement, I suppose; and although often when we were living at Le Mans I went and looked at these tributes, I saw only once a posy labelled, “Thank you, dear saint, for Mary Petronella.” My heart had warmed to that mother!
Blanche, partly because she was now in a family mood, partly out of curiosity about Berengaria and partly for convenience’s sake, came and lodged at L’Espan. And when we had discussed her marriage and the mystery of Richard’s behaviour towards Berengaria—she had no idea of the truth and said, ‘But I never expected her marriage to be very successful; she never seemed to me to be more than half alive,’ which I countered by saying that Berengaria had greatly altered, which was true, and I had confessed my ignorance of the latest developments for though Berengaria, in that rapturous dawn, had hugged and kissed me and promised to write, she had never done so—then we began to talk about L’Espan. And Blanche, who had spent years in nunneries, never blinded or bound by vows, always free to observe, told me everything she knew of conventual administration. No Jewish usurer could have bettered her account for conciseness and shrewdness—or for cynicism.
‘Abbesses are never chosen for their holiness! Holy Church selects leaders just as any other army would. Command goes to the competent, the vigorous, the clever. No abbess I ever knew would have been a monk if she had been a man—she would have been a soldier or a cardinal or an outlaw. You would have made a good abbess,’ she said. ‘And after all, L’Espan is a nunnery in all but intent.’
‘I would hesitate to make such a claim,’ I said, laughing, ‘what with dogs and cats and monkeys and idiots and Camille’s illegitimate child.’
‘And the abbess’s pet lute player!’
‘Architect and foreman builder,’ I amended—not too quickly. ‘Anyway, I never had any ambition to be an abbess and if you call me that I shall withhold my good wish for you.’
‘And what is that?’
‘Why, that St. Petronella will send you a fine big boy, of course.’
I wanted to divert her attention and little did I think that I was idly pronouncing her death sentence.
XIII
Busy again but without the fever, the need to distract. Vaguely, without urgency, preparing for the time when I should go to Apieta, leaving L’Espan self-governing, self-supporting. A busy, happy autumn. With books and music and human interests and impersonal problems and Blondel for company.
He drank but that I could understand. Out of the dark forest we all endeavour to find a path—your way is not my way; each must find his own—and though it grieved me to see his eyes grow bleary and his face puffy and to notice the increasing slovenliness of his dress and bearing, that was better than seeing him unhappy. He was never unpleasant or noisy in his cups and never sodden to insensibility; many of our most interesting and animated conversations took place after the flagon was empty. And though I knew why he drank so much, knew by name and from shared experience the pain that he thus alleviated and forgot for a while, there was a reason which could be announced to the whole world. His arm, though the wound had healed, was still troublesome; it ached before rain or when he was tired; in the morning it hung heavy and weak. And it was growing small, shrivelling like a blighted branch on a tree. Fortunately, during the time when it was first disabled he had begun to train his left hand and could now write and play his lute equally well with either.
It sounds, perhaps, a curious ménage in which to find happiness. But those months at L’Espan have a light on them, the light which makes me imagine, as I look back on them, that the weather was always fair, the sun always shining.
Then Berengaria’s letter came.
I have often noticed a special pathos about the writing of those who can only just master a pen or of those who, even if they are more skilled, dislike writing and seldom practise the art. The pen is a great diviner in the hands of novices. Practised writers can hide behind fine phrases, telling figures of speech; but the others—maybe it is a compensation—they write the really heart-wringing phrases, just as they make the most eloquent omissions.
I wish you were here, Anna, so that I could talk to you.
We had spent long-stretched, endless hours together with nothing to say to each another but I knew what she meant by that.
The King got better very soon and has since been busy. Once in a battle the French broke through and the fighting was so close I could see—like a tournament but horrible because men were killed and I feared he might be. It was two days before I knew.
That told me a good deal.
I have several ladies now. It is fashionable to take amusement in talking English; even those of Aquitaine are beginning to gabble it. They would have me learn but, as you know, I am not quick to learn. And Richard does not use it, though he can understand it.
If he had spoken it she would have given it all her attention and mastered it as swiftly as any of the gabbling women who no doubt used the strange tongue to exclude her.
There is talk that we might spend Christmas at Le Mans. I heard of Blanche’s visit. Arthur of Brittany was to have come to Richard but his mother Constance forbade it and Richard was angry.
Most informative! The marriage was now sufficiently mended for Berengaria to be thinking about a child and from that to jump to young Arthur, Richard’s nephew and heir presumptive. I’d warrant that at Christmas she would be following in Blanche’s steps to St. Petronella’s tomb.
The letter ended with the warmly expressed hope that, wherever they spent Christmas, I should join them. I would learn English, I thought, and sit deceitfully amongst her women.
The idea pleased me and the study enlivened the autumn and made another link of interest between me and Blondel; he knew a little and wished to learn too.
Amongst the women who had come to take shelter at L’Espan was a battered, gaunt old woman named Huldah who boasted that she was English not only by nationality and rearing but by blood. Her great-grandfather, she said, had been one of Harold’s thanes and had died in that group of the faithful who at the end of the long day had lain about the last “King of the English” on Senlac Field. His widow, already the mother of a girl baby, had later married a Norman lord and she had started a course of craft and guile which had, for well over a hundred years, kept one strain in the family pure unsullied by Norman blood.
‘My mother told me when I was eight,’ the old woman said, ‘I was
her
Saxon child; she had bedded with a hind while the man who thought he was my father was fighting the Scots for Stephen. If you look at me you can see the peasant blood in my face—but it was Saxon blood and to my mother more precious than that of Norman kings. She told me the whole story and I realised then, child as I was, why I had always seemed to be her favourite. She promised me that if she could contrive it she would find me an English husband for the English, mind you, were coming into their own again and there were noblemen of pure blood here and there to he found. In return she made me promise that if her schemes went astray I would bear one child of Saxon blood and to that child confide the secret of its heritage and exact the same promise. After that,’ said the old woman with a sigh, ‘I bore my knowledge and my responsibility as though it were the Holy Grail. But my mother died when I was ten and still unbetrothed. I was very plain, as you see, and no one had taken a fancy to my hind’s face and there were ten of us, for my mother had done her duty to her husband too; therefore our dowries were not tempting. But I was witty and to my cost; one evening when Francis of Arcachon supped at our table I made him laugh. He was a dour man who suffered much from his stomach and laughter was precious to him because so rare. In the morning he asked my father for my hand. My father was so pleased and flattered and when I ventured to protest he beat me black and blue. So married I was and to Arcachon I came, where I never had sight or smell of a Saxon man. So in me the carefully cherished line ends. I bore four half-breeds who have inherited, as half-breeds do, the worst of both stocks and that is why I am here. If I had been fortunate enough to get myself one Saxon child, that child would have been dutiful and I should not, in old age, have found myself dependent upon charity.’