An uncomfortably long silence.
Old Jacob’s looking, not at Garon but at me – and all at once I see his point. I know what he is thinking!
Maybe, just possibly…
More silence, endless. My husband and his steward dumb as fishes!
It’s not for me to speak. (I know I tend to do things the moment I decide them. But not this time – I can’t!) You’re only a spectator here, Elise. For heaven’s sake don’t let the wine go to your head!
I’m fidgeting, but mustn’t – mustn’t say it. Not a peep…
‘But what if the agreement should be with the lady of the manor?’ (And in the VERY MOMENT I decided not to!)
Worse still, I’m holding out my goblet to be refilled.
‘What if the bond is in my name?’ My voice, sounding shrill and far too loud.
All three heads turn. Three pairs of eyebrows raised in blank astonishment.
And, oh damnation – WHY! Why do I DO these things? Why couldn’t I have kept my silly mouth closed, instead of blurting the first hasty thing that popped into my head? So sure when I am speaking. So foolish when I pause to think!
Oh what in God’s Own name can ever have possessed me to so forget myself as to destroy my perfect (well maybe not so perfect) plan?
I AM A HOPELESS CASE!
CHAPTER NINE
When I look back to those last months before I left for the croisade, it’s not the preparation, not the training in the field beside the barn, the purchases of arms and armour that concern me. The thing I think about – and must think more about – is what Elise said, what Elise did. Above all what she did to me.
To take the day we rode to Lewes to the moneylender’s house, I’d known from what she’d said in bed that she was not afraid to speak her mind. But how could I have guessed what she’d agree with the old skinflint? I know he must have heard about her kinship with the Countess, whose patronage secured his business in the town. But how to guess what she’d propose? Or that he’d see her as a safer risk than me?
If the loan should be recorded in Elise’s name, he said, for her domestic use, then yes he might advance a sum, but not considering the times as much as fifty marks. And although he’d smiled and bowed and poured more wine, he wouldn’t budge from his best offer of four hundred silver shillings – a little more than thirty marks, repayable within five years at a usance rate of one percent a sennight.
‘Which, as you will have calculated, Master Kempe, is six and twenty shillings to be paid every quarter-year,’ he told my steward, blowing off the chalk to roll and tie the document for storage.
Less than I had hoped, it was enough to arm us and leave something over for our transport on the ships. Archbishop Baldwin was offering a shilling every day besides to all who entered his battalion. And if the worst came and our funds ran out, I didn’t think a man of God would let his people starve.
We left Lewes Borough on the afternoon we saw the Jew, by the old wooden bridge that spans the river. Riding before my wife with Kempe behind by way of the chalk road which skirts the salt pans to climb Ram’s Combe hill, I reined my horse where the track widenened to let Elise draw level. As she rode up a flock of water birds rose from the river flats below. Their wings flashed like a thousand blades against the clouds, and watching them I wished I had the gift of words. Hugh would have found some charming way of thanking her for what she’d done.
But, ‘Thank you, Lady,’ was the best I could come up with.
She’d missed the birds, was frowning at the ruts that ridged the track. ‘I don’t suppose I ever will know why I did it,’ she said. ‘I speak too often without pause for thought. Perhaps I’ve caught it from my maid.’
Which was the moment that I found my voice, to say how fortunate it was that she had spoken when she did. To tell her the agreement served us well, and then go on to spoil it by repeating the lame ‘Thank you, Lady,’
words I’d used before!
‘The agreement might serve well enough if I was ready to become a widow,’ she said bitterly. ‘Can you explain me to myself, My Lord? Explain why should I help you leave when I am bound by vows to keep you close and serve you as a good wife ought, at board and and in our bed?’
The breeze blew strands of hair across her face, and even as she fumbled to secure them, the invitation in Elise’s clear grey eyes was plain enough to send me down another track entirely. I saw the tip of her pink tongue dart out between her lips. It felt as if she’d licked me. And by then of course I was in no fit state to answer. The eyes, the hair, the tongue, the talk of bed had unexpectedly enlarged the situation.
They say a man with an erection thinks only where it points. Mine pointed on toward the manor and our curtained bed.
‘Goosey, goosey gander, whither shall ye wander? Upstairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber...?’ I took a special meaning from the nursery verse in those first weeks of marriage. Yet up here and in my present state it’s hard to see how anything so commonplace as frequent copulation could have had such a shattering effect.
‘Love is a fool’s game,’ was what I’d heard in barracks. ‘It leads a man to ruin.’ But in truth all men are libertines by nature, and now I see that what I fell in love with was as much or more to do with me and my own body as it was to do with hers. It’s said the liver is the seat of the hot humours. But I was governed by another part. To put it crudely I was governed by my own insistent cock.
It wasn’t sense but madness. That’s what I thought in the first moments of release; the thing I always thought when I had finished with a whore or eased myself with my own hand. But with Elise it was a madness of a different kind. The stale feeling of remorse I felt those other times lasted for days or even weeks. But each time I spent myself inside Elise, as soon as my heart stopped pounding and my blood subsided – in the mere space it took to close my eyes and tell myself I’d had enough, the tide swept in again. I needed more!
I might be judged and damned for it, but was no longer in control. I had succumbed to lust. The Church that claimed me for croisade could never have condoned it. Mine was a fall from grace, the sin that priests warned men of constantly – the carnal snare of Eve, or Jezebel, or the black sorceress, Morgan. They’d claim the woman tainted and bewitched me, blocked my path to virtue. Yet still I gorged and gorged again on the forbidden fruit. ‘If this is sin,’ I thought, ‘then I’m a sinner natural born!’
Even when I sought relief in open air and in the training that we undertook each morning in the muddy field behind the barn – in oaths and laughter and exchanging blows with other men – I had this wanting feeling all the time. Burning in my belly and my throat. Goading me like a tormenting gadfly. What can I say? I was a beast in rut, a wolfhound with a juicy bone! At the mere thought of bed and of Elise my entire body hardened. I longed to lay my hand against her hand, my arm against her arm, my leg against her thigh. Sharp thrills stabbed through me chest to groin, to burn like wounds and damp my under-drawers. In all my dreams, whatever I was doing I was hard as wood! Even the act of straddling to piss teased me with untoward sensations…
All right, I mustn’t wallow in all this. Not here. How can it help me now?
I started to reward myself for tasks achieved in training. For targets truly struck. Or just for riding home. If it took Raoul more than four hundred hoofbeats betwixt the orchard and the stables, I told myself I’d do it in broad daylight. I’d make her stoop to show me all her secret places. There were no limits to my fantasies although I never told her of them. How could I tell a gentle girl like that how frantically my body clamoured for an entry into hers? How much I wanted to be uncontrolled and brutal, to take her standing up or lying down, or on all fours if she’d submit to such indignity?
Well I couldn’t. Instead I rode about the place in a wet trance so hard in front you’d think the thing had grown a backbone… That’s how it was and how it feels when I recall what it was like to be inside her filling her entirely, cleaving through her wet, warm flesh towards a lightning strike of pleasure…
Oh God, I knew this wouldn’t do me any good. It can’t be what the Bérgé can have meant by learning from my past mistakes. Where am I in their catalogue? I need to have it clear.
I’d say the long and short of it is that I was too stupid at the time to see our union, the thing we both enjoyed so much, as anything but an unwarranted distraction. A blighted urge. The temptings of the Devil – Satan’s game.
But that of course was all before Khadija.
Fair gentle lady of my dreams,
With form so shapely, yet so slender;
The Lord God made you this, it seems,
With flesh so fair, smooth, soft and tender,
To keep you for my eyes alone;
No joys from others I have known
Whilst I possess you in my dreams!
Elise’s voice was like a linnet’s, soft and clear, and that song chimed with my feelings for her. Each night the Church permitted it we were conjoined as man and wife. And often in the morning too. And not infrequently at twilight. I only had to touch her and like dry tinder I was set alight.
My gratitude for all she brought me in our curtained bed made it difficult for me to deny her, and at her bidding I sent Jos and Bertram, even Bruno, to the outer chamber.
‘I would have thought that you’d prefer me to yourself,’ was how she put it, ‘without the ears of half the manor cocked in our direction.’
That autumn when we rode together out to the manor fields, along the fordroughs, up onto the downland ridges to view the changing colours of the sea beyond, she commented on everything. Found everything delightful. She talked a great deal, smiled sunny smiles and laughed without apparent reason, throwing back her head to let the sound fly free. Her laughter made a lovely sound like water over pebbles. Everything about Elise was lovely. The shade of her grey eyes, pale in the centre, almost sandy, dark at the edges almost blue. The shape of her mouth, shape of her breasts, the straight line of Elise’s neck, the softness of her hair, the clean smell of her skin. But there was more to her than loveliness, as I would soon discover.
Increasingly, when I came in upon my wife from hawking or from weapon practice with the men, to find her at her distaff or her loom, Elise surprised me with suggestions for improvement to the manor. As if we needed more than Haddertun could offer. With quite a dozen stools and chests to stumble over in the house, it seemed she wanted more. At her behest I had the stable dungheap moved to make a pallisaded garden for her in the yard. Another time I let her hang in our bedchamber her tapestry of a fat woman bathing. And although to smell a bit of sweat and shit is no more than man’s natural state, I took to bathing too for her in a tub before the fire.
‘They say a husband’s like new linen,’ she declared. ‘They both improve with washing!’
Because she said she’d like me with a beard I gave up shaving for a while, until the stubble grew too itchy to be borne. I let her trim my broken nails. I let her take on Jos’s work to comb out nits and trim my hair – and brushed her own long hair myself until it crackled. But when she begged me, as I’d known all along she would, to abandon my croisade, I smiled and told her nothing would be ventured until springtime – and then reached out to take her in my arms.
In my simplicity I thought that I could please Elise as much as she pleased me. But I was wrong.
In fact the more time I spent in my wife’s company, the less I seemed to know her. She was a mystery to me, a whole book of mysteries.
Who can understand a woman?
One moment she’d comply with all I asked, as sweet as sugar. The next she’d swing round like a wind-vane, to tell me what I must do as if she were my equal. Complaining when I overset things. Even when I farted. Her voice when she was moved to raise it gained a hard Lancastrian edge. She wanted linen on the tables, shutters on the windows, benches strewn with cushions. She acted by no rules of deference I recognised, as busy as a bedbug round the place. Creating a commotion; confounding everyone’s ideas of what was fitting for a wife.
But, be honest Garon, is that really what disturbed you most in those first months of marriage? Think about it.
With no one but yourself to deceive, there is no point in calling up the past if you can’t face the fact that it was when she seemed less interested in your body – when your storm of climax came without the lightning strike – that you felt mostly cheated by Elise.
‘Are you asking me to place our marriage above my trade of arms, above my honour as a soldier?’
He’s truculent, nonplussed.
‘Heavens, what has honour to do with this croisade? Do you think I can’t see that’s just another pretty word men use to women when they wish to leave them at their sewing and go off to kill someone or other – like barnfowl cocks and forest bucks, fighting for the sheer pleasure of the thing!’
(I do like the kind of pretended conversations you can have in daydreams. I usually indulge in them when I’m at the loom, or spinning yarn from carded wool. They give one such a chance to be decided without unpleasant consequences. To say just what you like and get away with it!)
‘So tell me what it is, My Lord, that makes men seek to hurt and kill each other? Why they won’t be satisfied until they’ve scarred another’s flesh or broken half his bones?’