Authors: Norah Lofts
Was it at that moment that I fell in love with him? I do remember that, mounting the stairs, helped by his hand, I was stricken anew by the cruelty of my plight. Oh, I thought, to be ordinary, shaped like a human being, to be looked at and touched with affection, desire! Even this crumb of contact, offered from a courtesy tainted by pity, was so sweet!
As we neared the top of the stairs Blanco, the huge black eunuch looked, like a guardian dog, out of the tiny room, not much larger than a kennel, in which he spent his doglike life. He looked at me with dumb reproach because I had eluded him and gone out alone. He loved to be taken into the street as escort; it was one of the diversions of his life which was, if possible, more dull and monotonous than that of the ladies he guarded. And at that moment the sight of Blanco blended most dismally with my secret feelings. He was a man, unsexed by his fellow men; I was a woman, unsexed by God. We would both have been better dead.
‘Blanco,’ I said, ‘I have forgotten to order my new slippers. Run, will you, and say that I have decided upon red leather lined with wool. The apprentice who brought up the patterns will know which I mean.’ His great black face split like a melon with joy at the prospect of a thirty minutes’ jaunt into the sunshine. The boy and I went on into the solar.
Having since seen the interior of several castles, I realise—as I did not then—that we women of the court of Navarre lived in circumstances of almost oriental luxury. Our grandfather had brought back with him from the East not only the disease which finally killed him but a great baggage train of treasures as well as a number of notions about comfort. There were no rushes on our floors, instead a great plenty of dark, silky rugs; there were divans, soft with cushions; rich curtains shrouded the bare stone of the walls and we five women owned among us no fewer than three silver looking glasses.
The occupants of the solar were sitting exactly as I had left them: Catherine, Maria and Pila idly stitching away at a piece of tapestry. The fourth corner, mine, was held up for their convenience on a stool, so the whole picture was spread out, easily visible, and even as I moved into the room, crying in a lively way, ‘Look what I’ve brought you! A lute player who knows all the prettiest songs,’ I glanced from habit at the amount of progress they had made. They were always at work on their corners, in a very lackadaisical fashion, and it amused me to neglect mine for a week and then to sit down and work for a couple of hours in a frenzy of energy and so keep myself even with them. It was only this spirit of competition which made the stitching at all tolerable to me. Their morning’s work, I noticed with satisfaction, had done very little to advance them.
As I spoke they raised their heads and with little exclamations of excitement and satisfaction began to scramble their work together. Blondel made another of his accomplished bows and then took the sailcloth wrapping from his lute. He looked quite composed now and I saw that he had spoken truly when he said he was not nervous.
I signed to him to wait.
‘Where is the princess?’ I asked.
‘Within,’ said Pila with a casual nod towards the inner door. ‘Our chatter disturbed her; she said her head ached and she didn’t desire anyone’s company.’
‘It’s to be hoped,’ Maria added, ‘that she won’t hear the lute. The boy should play very softly.’
Catherine, who disliked me very much and between me and whom a little nagging war of attrition, waged with sharp words, went endlessly on and on, said, ‘A lute, of all things!’
The simple phrase was an accusation of tactlessness laid against me. For lack of any other reason to explain their mistress’s recent decline in spirit, the ladies of the bower had fastened upon an explanation much to their taste—which was, in general, morbid. She was heartbroken, they believed, about the death of old Coci, our late lute player. I had never seen Berengaria show any particular sign of affection for the old man nor, I think, had they; but his death had happened by a most timely chance to occur just when things began to go wrong with her. I was in a position to know that at the time when Coci died everyone in a court could have dropped dead in a moment without causing Berengaria a pang; however, I subscribed to the legend because, satisfied with that, they refrained from further probing; and, living as we did, privacy was a rare and hard-come-by commodity, greatly valued even when purchased by a falsehood.
I hobbled across to the inner door and opened it, looking into the dim apartment which formed an anteroom to the sleeping apartments. It had a very small window and the tower wall rose sheer outside, so the place was never light enough to work in without candles. In very cold weather, when the solar remained cold despite the heaped fire, we did sometimes use it as a sitting place; with a fire and many candles it was cosy and pleasant. On a bright morning it was inexpressibly dreary.
Berengaria sat on a bench, her elbows on her knees, her chin propped on her linked hands, her eyes fixed on the section of the wall outside the window. She did not turn her head when I opened the door.
‘Berengaria,’ I said.
‘Oh, you’re back, Anna. What do you want?’
‘I want you to come out and listen to some music. I heard a boy performing very well in the market this morning and I persuaded him to come back.’
‘My head aches,’ she said, ‘and the last thing I want is to listen to music.’
My natural impulse was to say, ‘Very well, don’t,’ and to go away and shut the door. But my newborn pity for her was still young and vital at that time and there were other considerations. In a small confined community a settled melancholy in its most important member is not conducive to cheerfulness amongst the others and the general atmosphere in the bower had, of late, been very miserable. So I said:
‘Do come and listen. He plays very well and we shall all enjoy it more if you are there.’
She rose with a sigh of resignation and walked into the solar. I stayed to close the door behind her and when I turned to face the room I had a feeling that something had happened. Berengaria had halted a few paces inside the room and was staring at the boy; her eyes remained expressionless but her mouth, which sometimes betrayed her, was open. Across the room the boy was staring back at her with astonishment and admiration writ large on his face. But that was not to be wondered at, for she was extremely beautiful. We were, of course, accustomed to her loveliness but anyone seeing her for the first time must pay that tribute of the moment’s awe which one pays to a cherry tree in full bloom with the sunlight on it or to one of those scarlet-and-gold sunsets.
The tension was eased when Berengaria took her seat. I signalled to the boy to begin and he proceeded to play as vilely as anyone I ever heard. Fumbling, missing notes and striking false ones and singing in a sharp falsetto voice, he blundered through a song and I saw Catherine catch Pila’s eye, pull down the corners of her mouth as though she had tasted a lemon and make a grimace towards me. Ever since Berengaria had chosen me for her confidante and seemed to seek my company there had been jealousy in the bower and Catherine, least good-natured of the three, had shown her feelings quite plainly. Her grimace now was less a comment on the boy’s appalling performance than a criticism of me for bringing him in.
At the end of the first tune I managed to catch his eye and give him a smile of encouragement and I willed with all the power in me that he should play better. He grinned at me in a way that made me think of someone grinning through physical torment, shook back his hair and broke into the amusing ditty of
The Dame of Chalon and Her Little Red Hen
. That was better. And when he proceeded to play
The Death of Chloris
he was performing almost as well as he had done in the market place.
When that extremely heart-rending song reached its end Catherine said in a voice of sharp challenge:
‘Can you play any of Abélard’s?’
Abélard’s songs were by that time so well known and so popular that spit boys hummed them as they basted the meat and ’prentice boys ran errands to their rhythm and the question, tossed out that way, was deliberately insulting.
The boy said calmly:
‘Yes, my lady. And one I know that is not so well worn as the rest. Shall I sing it?’
He looked to the strings of his lute, moving a little farther into the room as he did so and then, leaning one elbow against the back of a settle in a pose suddenly easy and negligent, sang:
To be thy servitor is all I ask;
To see thee happy is my only joy;
To do thy bidding is my chosen task.
Knowst not, thy smiling is my sun at noon,
Thy voice, e’en when it chides, my singing bird,
Thine eye, however bent, my sun and moon?
The world is nought, the future harsh and drear;
Frail is our hope and threatened is our joy.
But ah, how dear thou art, how dear, how dear!
With that song—and it was set to very moving music—he had conquered the ladies, even the prejudiced Catherine. When it ended they broke into little exclamations of praise.
Berengaria said, ‘You play very well. Thank you. And now you must take some refreshment,’ and she signalled to Pila who, because she was greedy by nature and had once run her own household and understood not only food itself but the peculiarities of cooks, had been put in charge of our commissary. And then she called me to follow her and walked into the inner room.
‘Anna, where did you find him?’
‘In the market place.’
‘I want him to stay here.’
‘To take Coci’s place?’
She nodded.
Now surely for a strolling player with a bad master to be at one stroke promoted to the position of lute player to the princess was a fantastic piece of luck. Henceforward the boy would have a roof over his head, be certain of three good meals a day, be warm in winter. And he
would
change a bullying master for a kind and indulgent mistress. Could fate be kinder?
But I thought of Coci, cantankerous, peevish and yet somehow servile; kindly treated and yet somehow negligible, of little more account than a pet dog or monkey; playing the same tunes over and over to the same audiences; sorting out the silks and the wools for the embroideries; bearing the brunt of the ladies’ little moods of irritability; listening to their complaints about their little ailments; running their little errands. Something rebelled in me at the prospect of the boy reduced to that. Instead I saw him out in the open, leading his bear from market place to village green, always welcome, always with a new audience, a free unmastered man. And I preferred that picture of him. Security can cost too much.
I was too wise to voice even a hint of opposition directly.
‘Do you think he’s good enough?’ I asked. ‘Out in the open I was deceived; indoors I found him fourth-rate. And Father promised to bring a musician from Aragon, you remember. Is it worth bothering with meantime?’
‘I don’t care if he never touches his lute again,’ Berengaria said quite vehemently. ‘I want him to stay here.’
‘But why, then?’
She was silent for a moment, looking down at her hands. Then she said, ‘I’ll tell you, though I have no doubt you’ll think it sounds mad and begin to share Mathilde’s suspicions.’ (That surprised me; Mathilde was very outspoken to me but very discreet, I thought, with Berengaria herself.) ‘I want him to stay because I once dreamed about him.’
‘Never having seen him?’ I asked sceptically.
‘I recognised him at once. I almost exclaimed when I saw him. And he must stay because the dream made him of the greatest importance to me.’
My attitude towards dreams, like my attitude to many other things, was extremely mixed. Dreams and their meanings formed one of the main topics of chatter amongst the women of the bower and I was often bored by the trite, arbitrary explanations assigned them. ‘Dream of water and you’ll hear from your lover…’ Now why should that be? And what happened if the dreamer had no lover? On the other hand, warning and prophetic dreams had an acknowledged place not only in secular literature but in Holy Writ as well; how else was the Holy Child saved from Herod’s infanticidal hand but through Joseph’s dream orders to make the flight into Egypt? One must keep an open mind on these matters. And my interest was sharpened by the reflection that never before in all our lives together had I heard Berengaria mention any dream of her own or known her to regard anyone else’s with other than mild derision.
‘What was the dream?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ she said with an air of making nothing much of it, ‘it was one of those nights when I couldn’t sleep and Mathilde insisted on giving me some of her poppyhead physic. I dreamed I was in the oubliette, down in the dark with the toads and rats. Very horrible. I felt so completely abandoned. I realised for the first time what the name means. I was really forgotten and I knew I should stay there till I died. And then I looked up to where the light showed and I saw that boy. He had a little posy of flowers in his hand and he was looking at me kindly. He threw down the flowers and immediately I was free, above ground, out in the open sunshine. I no more knew how I got out than I knew why I was there in the first place. But just now, when I saw him and recognised him, I knew that it was important that he shouldn’t go away again. Sometime, somehow, I’m sure he’ll do me a good service.’
The simple, undramatised, unemphatic manner of her telling the dream seemed to give it force. I felt a little cold shudder run over me. Was it mere chance that I had gone to the market this morning? Mere coincidence that I had conceived the idea of bringing the boy back with me?
‘There’s a bear in the case,’ I said lightly, trying to dismiss my metaphysical thoughts. I told her about the bear.
‘Oh, buy the bear then, Anna. Anything so long as he stays. Here, take my purse.’
She handed her purse to me in a very lordly way and I took it with justifiable misgiving. She was extravagant about clothes and other feminine accoutrements and the worst accountant in the world, so she was always hard up and almost always in debt. I was not at all surprised, upon looking into the purse, to find that it contained less than would purchase an ordinary milking goat, let alone a trained performing bear which could dance and balance a ball on its nose.