Authors: Norah Lofts
Some of this may be due to unwitting imitation or the desire to please but mainly it is due, I think, to a peculiar attitude of mind in women. They are capable, as men are not, of ignoring the sex of a person who, by reason of age or station, is ineligible for loving. I will guarantee that if five men, living together as we five women did, had had introduced into their company a young female who, though pretty and of engaging manners, was entirely ineligible, they would yet remain conscious of her sex. They would not immediately try to turn her into a male. Catherine, Pila and Maria did try, from the first, to emasculate Blondel.
‘Dear boy, these silks are tangled; sort them for me.’
‘Blondel, tell me, which girdle is better with this gown, the rose or the yellow?’
And worse things, worse. They talked before him of things they would never have dreamed of mentioning before a man or before any boy who was to become a man, not merely of shifts and body linen, of bowels loose or bound, but of the punctually recurrent headaches, the pains under the girdle, the ankles that swelled with the regularity of the moon’s changes. Nothing was hidden.
I was sickened; shamed for myself and for them. My body was crooked and unfitted for love but my mind and my feelings were, I had discovered, those of an ordinary woman. I could look on this boy and feel not only love but fierce desire; and often I did so look, when I was safe from observation, and gave my imagination rein and thought how it would be if I were straight and comely and he my lover. Into such a dream would break some woman’s voice, smearing, denying, reducing; making what to me was a man as sexless as Blanco, the eunuch.
In such moments of torment I wished that he would leave. Take his lute and go out into the world and find some girl who would regard him as I did and discover his manhood. But the desire to escape seemed to have died in him and I could never bring myself to say the resurrecting word. On the other hand, he did not succumb easily to his enchantment. He would often absent himself—giving the bear as an excuse—and go off to the stables and come back smelling of horses, leather, oil and liniment. The ladies would then wrinkle their noses and complain. And I would lean as near as I could on some pretext or other, savouring the male, outdoor scent which fitted in with the vision I cherished of another Blondel and another Anna.
I knew quite well, of course, why he remained with us almost against his will. He was in love with Berengaria in much the same dumb, hopeless fashion in which I was in love with him and in which she was in love with Richard Plantagenet. Sometimes I thought it was a little comic that there should be three of us under the same roof, all suffering from the same ailment and all keeping our secrets so well. And sometimes I thought, All this wasted love, all this yearning towards someone who is yearning for someone else, like those figures perpetually pursuing one another around the Greek vase which Grandfather brought home from the East. All that was lacking to make the circle complete was that the Duke of Aquitaine should lose his eyesight and his senses and fall in love with me!
I had to make what mental sport I could out of the situation because I dared not be sorry for myself. For Berengaria, as the year moved on and no news came from England, I did feel sorry and for Blondel I did suffer vicarious agonies.
Whatever could be done for Berengaria had been done or was being done. For me nothing short of rebirth could do anything. But as the year moved downhill into autumn and my love-sharpened eyes saw new lines carved into the boy’s face and I daily witnessed the deadly soft encroachments of the bower, it did occur to me that something might be done to save him. He was young, his attachment to Berengaria was completely fantastical; if he could be got away, restored to a normal manner of life, he would be saved. He’d fall in love, I thought, with the first pink-cheeked, round-bosomed girl who looked at him kindly.
I realise now that I was guilty of supreme egotism, attributing to myself and to myself alone devotion and deathless fidelity and underrating these qualities in others. Be that as it may, during the early days of that autumn I began to cast about me for some way of getting Blondel out of the bower—with his own consent—and away from Berengaria. And it is odd to think that Maria’s wedding dress put what I thought was a tool into my hand.
VI
Somewhere, somebody of inventive mind had introduced a new “laced” dress to the feminine world. This did not mean that the dress was trimmed with lace but that the bodice was cut so narrow that the front had to be opened to get it over the wearer’s head and then the aperture was laced up with a cord or a ribbon pushed through a number of little pierced holes. This made the gown so close-fitting that it clung to the breasts.
Some high dignitary of the Church—I think in Paris—had been shocked by this fashion and had complained to the Pope who had promptly ordered that sermons be preached against it in all churches. So one Sunday morning we in Pamplona who had never seen or heard of a laced gown until that moment sat and listened meekly to a homily against this “immodest, iniquitous, and most unchristian device which provoketh vanity in women and lust in men.”
Maria was making preparations for her wedding at that time. She had been betrothed as a child and had seen her bridegroom only once and had then been somewhat shocked to find that his mouth would not close over his teeth. So her attitude towards her nuptials was practical rather than romantic and she craved for a spectacular wedding. The idea of wearing one of the new laced gowns appealed to her but none of us had the remotest idea how such a gown was made or what it looked like.
On the Monday, Maria very cunningly sought out the preacher of the sermon and begged him to tell what a laced gown was, as she was very anxious to avoid the sin of wearing one unwittingly. The poor man was seventy years old and had probably never looked comprehendingly at any woman’s gown but he was anxious, naturally, that Maria should avoid falling into sin through ignorance, so he showed her a little woodcut which had come with his instructions to preach the sermon. And the woodcut showed Satan, the father of all lies, wearing a laced gown and exposing a pair of breasts of which any nursing mother would have been proud. Maria brought it home with her to show to the rest of us so that we also might be kept from sin.
If you put your thumb over the leering, grinning face of Satan, the effect was extremely seductive; and though I didn’t say anything about it, I did wonder to myself, Is this wise? Or kind? So many celibate priests, some of them young. But perhaps they wouldn’t think of blotting out Satan with their thumbs!
Having studied the woodcut thoroughly, we wrapped and sealed it and sent it back by Blanco.
Maria then tackled her sempstresses, none of whom, of course, had seen a laced gown or even the picture. And when she was tired of explaining she appealed to Blondel.
‘You can draw, can’t you? Could you draw just the dress, with the shape and the holes and the cord, to explain how it should look? You needn’t bother,’ she added kindly, ‘to draw the old devil.’
Blondel shot me a glance as he so often did. And oh, how dear those little private jokes were to me.
He set to work and eventually handed to Maria a sketch which was, she said, exactly what was needed. Two other sheets of paper he screwed into balls and flung into the fire. They missed the flames and fell into the ashes and later, watching my moment, I retrieved them.
One sheet did show the old devil wearing a laced gown but not a leering, grinning devil; something far worse, a more dreadful, brooding, tormented devil, consumed by his own fire, gnawed by his own worm. A very nasty little picture indeed. The other sheet bore a lot of straight lines and angles which bore no resemblance to anything I had ever seen.
The picture of the devil I smoothed out and laid flat in a book. Let him think it had been burned. The other I kept openly. And next time I found him alone I produced it and said, ‘Maria’s wedding gown! She will look beautiful.’ I hoped that would make him laugh, and it did.
‘I thought I burned it,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Just an idea I had. A sort of mangonel but improved. You see, I thought that if the stone were projected from
here
, instead of
here
, as is customary, it would fall with greater force. The tendency of everything is to fall and this way it works with the pulley instead of against it. I don’t suppose you know anything about mangonels…’
‘I can see what you mean. Like this…’ I took up two balls of the tapestry wool and threw them, one after one fashion, one after the other.
‘That’s it exactly,’ he said, delighted by my readiness to understand.
‘You shouldn’t have thrown this away. I shall show it to Father. It’s virtually a new weapon and the man who brought it to bear against his enemy would have the advantage.’
‘May I see it again?’ Innocently I handed it to him and he looked at it for a second and then with a movement that I could not forestall laid it on the very heart of the fire.
‘You silly young fool,’ I cried, bitterly angry because I had imagined Father taking him out of the bower, installing him in the armoury, lavishing favours and rewards on him. ‘Oh, why did you do such a cursed, stupid thing?’
‘I thought I had burnt it,’ he said. ‘It was just the idle work of an idle moment. I was only curious to see if the idea were good or not.’
‘And it was. Even I, ignorant as I am, could understand it… Oh well,’ I said, recovering my composure, ‘you can easily draw it again. I’m sure Father would be delighted with it.’
‘Please,’ he said, ‘forget all about it.’
‘Why should I? A mangonel of that pattern throwing a lead ball or a great stone would be far more deadly than the old kind.’
‘And who but the devil would wish to make a tool that made war more bloody than it is already?’
‘Anybody but a fool. There’s a righteous side in every war.’
‘And could you always be certain that your new tool was in the hands of the righteous, even if you were competent to judge the comparative claims to righteousness?’
‘I suppose not always. But Father—this war in Aragon, for example—’
‘But the Aragonese think their cause is righteous. Otherwise they wouldn’t fight. No nation of people ever went to war believing they were wrong. How could they?’
‘Well, then, what about the crusades?’
‘They seem righteous to us because we are Christians but I daresay that to those who follow Mahomet—’
‘Be careful,’ I said. ‘In another minute you’ll be guilty of heresy.’ I spoke in the rallying tone which one uses when arguing with someone one loves. But he stopped and looked down at his hands in obvious confusion. I then became a little confused myself and took refuge in blunt speech.
‘About wars, right or wrong, I know very little. But one thing I do know, Blondel, and that is that it is very wrong for a man of your quality and attainments to waste his life playing sentimental tunes and winding wools and drawing wedding dresses.’
Hot angry blood flew to his face but he said quite calmly: ‘Don’t we pray for contentment in the state to which God has called us? It may be virtue in me.’
‘And it may be that in the confusion of our minds we fail to distinguish between the will of God and our own wishes.’
At that moment Berengaria and Maria entered the solar; Maria carried Blondel’s drawing. Berengaria was saying:
‘But think how dreadful it would be if they refused to marry you because they disapproved of your dress!’
‘They couldn’t make me take it off, could they? Not in church. Besides, the bishop often games with my father and owed him a thousand crowns when last I heard the reckoning. It would ill become him to complain. My mother may but I shall point out to her how useful it will be later when I am feeding my baby.’
Well, if it were the will of God that Blondel should listen to talk which proved that they looked on him as sexless, it wasn’t mine. I made up my mind that evening that I would get him out of the bower.
I made my first move by gaining his interest in a plans for my house and when we had talked about it and he had drawn several sketches, I said:
‘Blondel, if the princess would give her permission, would you go to Apieta and overlook the building for me—or at least get it started? You understand what I want and you could explain the plans as nobody else can.’ I hesitated for a moment and then decided to make play with my infirmity—I think for the first time in my life. ‘It is hard for me. I couldn’t stumble about where they were digging foundations or climb a ladder to see the roof laid aright. I must have someone I can trust implicitly.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He looked thoughtful and then pleased. ‘I always had an interest in building. Yes, I think I—it’d be a change from the wool winding.’
‘I’d give you absolute authority,’ I said. ‘You could lodge in the castle and when you’d given your orders for the day you could take a horse and ride in the woods. The woods around Apieta are very beautiful and full of game. Will you do it for me, Blondel?’
‘Yes,’ he said, this time more firmly. ‘If the princess will consent.’
I had most beautiful vision of him restored to man’s estate, his heart mending under the influence of new interests and fresh surroundings. The house would take some time to build, and by the time it was finished he would be fond of it, perhaps, and if he wished to stay in Apieta I would stock a farm and suggest that he look after it for me. He loved horses, so I would hire Jaime of Alva’s famous stallion and breed foals of the kind now so highly thought of because they combined the swift grace and spirit of the Arab with the strength and staying power of the European horse. And one day Blondel would marry and have children to whom I could stand as godmother.
When my turn for brushing the hair came round I took it and I sedulously spent some moments in chat in order to get Berengaria into a good mood. Unfortunately she began to talk about Maria’s wedding which was now imminent and not, in the circumstances, the most cheerful of topics for the princess. However, I said several bright, silly, slightly malicious things and managed to make her laugh and then I said, ‘Berengaria, I have a favour to ask you.’
‘You’ve done me many,’ she said amiably. So I proceeded to tell her about my house and my wish to borrow Blondel. I made it sound a very temporary arrangement indeed.
‘Oh no,’ she said as soon as I finished speaking. ‘I can’t spare him. I told you why.’
‘But surely, just to go to Apieta—two days’ ride away. I only want to borrow him. He could come back at once if you needed him for anything.’
‘I want him to stay here. The world is full of architects and builders, Anna, proper ones. Get some of them to work on your house.’
I was so angered by her refusal that I almost snapped out that that wouldn’t get Blondel out of the bower and out of the reach of his enchantress; but such a remark would be fatal because it would render my next attempt suspect and I knew that if this failed I should make another and another. I should never rest now until I had removed him. But I hadn’t foregone hope of getting him to Apieta which would be the nicest way of removing him because then I should remain in touch with him and perhaps one day join him there. So I dug in my heels; I could be stubborn too.
I pleaded for a little while and then I realised that we were merely repeating ourselves, so I laid down the brush and said:
‘If you will be so selfish and unhelpful to me, Berengaria, next time Father wants to marry you off to somebody I shan’t say a cool sensible word for you. I did last time. Father takes quite a bit of notice of what I say.’ That wasn’t boasting; it was true.