Haddertun.
Why wasn’t it enough? Why couldn’t I have understood that men do best in every way when they are left to work and bring some order to a limited existence? To make a gift to life of all they have to offer? I knew it later in Khadija’s house and in the olive groves, have found it with the Bérgé. But back then at Haddertun contentment on so small a scale was not a thing I valued. Back then I was a fool.
What else is there about that morning to recall while I am looking down upon the fool who knew he loved the woods and meadows of his childhood, yet was determined still to leave them? Up here beyond the toils of man, I shake my head but cannot change my foolish past.
Look back, look down then Garon to see the poor fool and his dog walk out to Shaws beyond the village crossways, scattering a flock of geese…
A two-yoke oxen team, afield already, was ploughing Hobbe’s half-acre strip for winter wheat. Real ploughing. Not the sort a bridegroom does in bed. As the son of a free tenant who owed me rent instead of labour, John Hideman knew the business better it was held than any in the village, ploughing in exchange for boon work on his father’s holding. As little lads we’d played like cubs together, John and I, wrestling, spearing fish and frogs and shooting ducks along the millstream that we called ‘the mudsquelch’. Now I watched him plodding steadily from balk to headland with his following of gulls – bare-headed, whistling to the oxen, an upright figure on a huge expanse of field. His was a skill that called for steadiness and strength. It was the reason why I’d come.
‘John!’ I called his name in common Engleis to stay his team before the goad-boy could attempt the turn.
‘Who-a-a!’ John waited for me at the plough-tail, leaning on its handles. As I approached him through the stubble with Bruno dancing on before, the sweet, rich smell of fresh-turned earth engulfed us.
‘Aye Sir Garry, I’m fit an’ thank ye,’ he replied to my first question. But as a man who liked to set his thoughts in order before committing them to speech, he paused awhile before he gave an answer to the second.
‘Aye sir, I’ll train to be a soldier right ’nough. Reckon I’ve the sprawl for an adventure justabout,’ he added after further thought.
John Hideman’s face, as broad and brown as earth, showed no concern at leaving Haddertun and two small brothers from his father’s second wife, to fight a race of Saracens reputed to eat roasted Christian babies for their breakfasts.
He asked no questions, offered no objections.
How easily he pledged his life!
At the time of the Empress Mathilde’s War our manor had supported half a dozen men-at arms. But at present there were only four.
‘And I’ll be needing three to stay behind and see my lady safe,’ was what I told the ploughman. ‘Then three more freemen to be trained with Jos and me for the campaign.’
‘Now then I’ll tell ye what. Young Alberic ’ud be middlin’ handy with a pike, Sir Garry,’ John offered scratching a gnat-bite on his arm.
He had the peasant’s habit of looking anywhere but at you when he spoke. As if it would be rude to meet your eyes. ‘Rare ol’ boy is Albie. Sound as any roach I reckon. If ye could do with two lads from the village, ye couldn’ hardly hope to have a better man longside of ye. Exceptin’ when the kiddy’s drunk.’
‘And what does he do then?’ I had to ask.
‘Gen’rally-always mortifies yer ears by singin’ like a wounded crow,’ John said. ‘An’ then tells anyone who’ll listen that Sussex is God’s Country, an’ more’n likely Adam came from wealden clay.’
Later in the manor guardroom, Bertram Glynde, a balding man of forty summers who in his day had served my father as a squire, was ready to make up the band of four who’d join me on croisade. I was his lord, he said, and could command him. But if the choice had been his own, he’d still have gone. He didn’t see why sticking Sarsens otherwheres should be much different to sticking pigs in the weald forest, Bertram said. And nor just then did I.
The first English fleet had already left the port of London to cross the Narrow Sea before the autumn storms. Yet it was clear that with an army to equip still, the new king wouldn’t follow until spring. That gave the rest of us six months in which to train. But we could not begin too soon. I spent the rest of that day helping the men clear an area behind the barn to make a training ground. So it wasn’t until after Vespers that I climbed the manor stairway to resume my duties as a bridegroom. And in the hours between? Had I thought even for a moment of my bed? Or of the bride I’d left there in the tangle of its sheets?
The truth?
The truth was that I had thought of little else. Each time I cut the hard stalk of a thistle or a dock, or thrust a spade into a molehill, I’d felt a sharp thrill of anticipation. Knowing what was still to come.
Jos took my cloak and boots from me outside the chamber door. Inside I found her with her hair unbound, spread out across the pillows as before. Except that this time she was wide awake and waiting.
‘Would you think me unladylike if I should bid you welcome, Garon?’ she asked with her unsettling smile.
‘Unladylike’? Or did she say ‘immodest’? It hardly mattered which. Because what mattered was that she said Garon,
the very first time she had used my name. The next thing she said was that our mothers had examined our bedsheets together to confirmed the union.
‘And you would think the way they talked that they could read our fortunes in the stains.’ She stunned me with her frankness.
I know that I was stunned, because I have a picture of her looking up at me and waiting for an answer that was slow in coming. I can see it now, Elise’s face. Her smile no longer certain. Her bright eyes searching mine.
Grey eyes, of course. Her eyes were grey!
I stared into them while she waited. Then stared some more, began to sweat – and finally said… ‘Ah, yes good.’ Can I believe that I said anything so FEEBLE?
It’s not that I feel less than other men. It’s just that when I am embarrassed, words tend to get clogged between my brain and tongue. Or squeezed into a muffled croak as my throat closes round them, so when they finally do emerge they’re generally the wrong ones. ‘Ah, yes good.’ My God, it was pathetic! Even thinking of it brings me out in a cold sweat.
But what if I could change the tongue-tied bridegroom of that night to what I have become in this place, here and now? Given all that’s happened since and given one more chance? Could I do better with Elise? I honestly don’t know the answer. Or haven’t found it yet.
‘I thought you would be glad,’ was what she said next as if she hadn’t heard my blunder, and if the smile she gave me then was less assured, it was nothing to the awkwardness I felt at having to undress by firelight with her watching every move. I kept my back to her as long as possible. For ’though I mostly don’t care how I look I could have wished myself more handsome in the face; and yes, regret as all men do at some time or another that what I have between my legs is nowhere near as fine to look at as it feels – the dragon that reduces to a worm. I had already given it a furtive tug. A quick waggle to improve its length. But still felt the need to shield the thing from her with one hand as I climbed into bed.
We lay unmoving side by side, although it wasn’t long before she told me I could touch her. That she wouldn’t bite. ‘Or if you’re lucky even scratch.’ She gave a nervous giggle which didn’t help at all.
I didn’t speak, then couldn’t as I watched her sit up to remove her shift. I saw the flutter of a vein in her long throat. Rosy nipples. The shadow of her navel. But above all – or rather well below it – the delicate, the secret hairgrown centre of my need closed softly on the promise of what lay inside!
‘Lady, how white! How beautiful you are!’
The words that time were mine, all seven of them, which had to be some kind of an improvement. I muttered them into her neck as with relief I felt myself expand.
‘Elise…’ My own first use of her baptismal name, and after it, ‘I want, oh God I want…’
To start a speech is one thing. To finish it is something else, and by that time I could no longer separate the words from feelings or the feelings from the action. At no time is a man more totally a man, I have now come to think, than when he feels the need to be joined to a woman.
At first it was my body I was riding, not Elise’s. My thighs on her. My hands on her. My own flesh hard as iron in her and hot as fire! ME, MINE! MY FLESH, MY NEED!
I was the destrier, unstoppable in action, thundering full stretch to the attaint!
Then all at once and to my great surprise I found myself the rider not the horse. A man apart, astride my own unthinking body, hauling on the reins, demanding I should feel what she was feeling underneath me, to make a gift to her of what I felt myself. I sensed a movement not my own. I found a skill I had not trained for – and finding it, I heard her moaning, mooing. Heard her cry of sheer astonishment as her womb-head closed round me like a sucking calf.
To prompt the spur. The gallop to the finish. Close to pain and unresisting.
‘Mon Dieu!’ Her eyes were full of tears, her smile ecstatic.
I forced myself to smile as well, and thank her. But looking back I see that I still wasn’t sure what we’d just celebrated. And at that moment lying blugeoned, sandbagged, empty of emotion, all I wanted to be honest was to sleep.
Upward, upward wings the lark, singing out his heart in flight...
Parts of me are floating, other parts unable and unwilling to escape. Things happening about me and inside me – surprisingly delicious tingles, the great thumping heartbeats of a creature trapped within my ribs. Something dizzying and stronger than my will – sucking at his shoulder as if my mouth needs what I’m getting elsewhere. Feelings moving, changing, bunched like sheaves and bristling like spines, as slippery and silky as a loosening girdle – unravelling and opening as if my bones have melted. Blissful! Yes, oh yes! And twenty-thousand times more thrilling than I’d hoped!
Now lingering in long repeating echoes.
And not just there, but everywhere – in every part of me right to the end of every finger, every boneless toe!
No other place but this. The world has disappeared – and how could I have ever thought him brutal? How could I imagine that anyone so clumsy could release such glorious, delightful feelings? (And if we weren’t heard that time by the men beyond the beam, then all who lie there must be deaf!)
Mon Dieu, I know that I need practice – but then I never guessed… I’d say it felt like heaven if I didn’t think the Devil had a hand in it somewhere. If this is the forbidden fruit, ’tis hardly any wonder Eve was tempted!
He is asleep already. It seems that men can’t help it afterwards. He smiled to thank me in the middle of a yawn, then closed his eyes and in two shakes began to snore.
Perhaps it’s better after all without too many words?
So am I now in love?? And if I am, is it with him? Or rather more disgracefully, WITH IT?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Well Garon’s not the only one with a campaign plan. I’ve one as well. I lay in bed this morning staring at the dark folds of its curtains and worked it out most beautifully while he was still asleep.
‘Your best plan for keeping him is to make sure he gets a child on you as soon as possible, chérie,’ was Maman’s best advice while she saw to the packing for her journey home.
‘Of all the knights who take the cross, I am persuaded more than half will end by paying an amercement to forswear the oath and stay where they belong,’ she said. ‘The cost of the journey will show most of them the error of their choice. But add a warm wife with a swollen belly to the argument, and it’d be a cold sort of man who’d turn his back and ride away.’
‘Be sure I’ll always think of you, Elise, and be there when you need me,’ was rather what I wish she’d said before we parted. But she didn’t. What Maman did was kiss me soundly on both cheeks, remind me that too kind a mistress makes for idle servants, then turn her own back on me to ride out with her laden mules.
And Maman will never know, because I’ve never told her, how much I’m going to miss her bustling backside and her endless good advice. Hod calls me things like ‘duck’ and ‘lambkin’ – but never ‘chérie’ or ‘petite’. There’s no one now that Maman’s gone to use those names to me, and that’s so sad!
I’d felt as happy as a queen that second night when Garon showed me what marriage could be like. I smiled into my mirror the next morning, a finished woman as I thought. But nothing’s ever finished really. There’s always more to come, if not from Maman then from Hod who has her own ideas of how to start a child.
‘His fetch stinks. There’s your first good sign,’ she said with one hand on my shoulder while we strained for a last glimpse of Maman’s palfrey from the window. ‘But mebbe too much on the sheets for choice an’ not enough inside ye?’
She chuckled grimly. ‘Eat all ye can of quinces, honey and sweet almonds is what I say. An’ keep ’im at it while ’e’s hot. I’ve never ’eld with them as think ye shouldn’t take it in too regular – an’ if you’ll listen to ol’ Hod, ye won’t be too particular about Church-rulings neither, duck, for all the days ye ought to be at prayer. Bless me, if priests could ’ave their way you’d only do it thrice a week!’
She tucked a tuft of iron grey hair into a coif which never has and never will contain it. ‘Time enough for prayers, I say, when you’ve a brace o
f
’ealthy boys at foot.’