That’s what I’d like to ask him to his face. It’s what all women want to know. Why must men SPOIL things so? Do they consider anyone except themselves? Has any woman in the history of the world ever really understood a man?
‘Lady, you know full well that we are summoned to a Holy War, blessed by the Church. It is the highest duty any soldier can perform.’
‘The truth wrapped in clean linen is still the truth, My Lord.’
Or maybe?: ‘You men are worst than beasts, for beasts have never found it needful to justify their lust for blood as honourable and holy.’
(All things I’d like to say, if only I dared voice them!)
We had our worst exchange, a real one, last Tuesday evening after Vespers, when I begged him to put Archbishop Baldwin and King Richard and the Holy City of Jerusalem out of his mind for once, and think instead of all we had in Sussex. I let my tongue run on too readily, I know I do. I shouldn’t have provoked him. But having gone so far I somehow had to venture further, and ask him to consider if he’d not been happier with me at Haddertun than anywhere, with anyone, in his entire existence? Why could he not forget his wretched oath, I asked, and stay where he belonged?
He doesn’t say much as a general rule. But he surprised us both on Tuesday by finding all the words he needed.
‘Forget? How in the devil’s name do you think I can I forget?’ he shouted. ‘Do you expect the Kings’ Croisade to wait on your convenience? Do you think I’d break my pledge, to cringe at home like a cur in a kennel?’
We’d been sitting on a bench before the fire in our bedchamber with goblets of heated wine cupped in our hands. I nursed mine like a fledgeling while I listened to the wood crackling in the hearth – and told him that if God could not protect His own most holy city, He hardly should expect our Englishmen to do it for Him.
‘Never tell a man he’s stupid,’ Maman counselled, ‘even if he’s silly as a snipe, because it’s not a thing he’s likely to forget.’
So – ‘I think you should uphold your other pledges first, to honour your contract to love your wife and cleave to her to your life’s end or hers,’ was how I put it to him, resting my free hand on Garon’s appealingly. ‘Do you not see, My Lord, that it is easier to go than to remain? It takes more courage to stand out against men’s expectations than to prove yourself a hero? Sir Hugh at least has the consideration to stay at home to guard your mother and their child.’ I tried, intended to sound reasonable.
But here’s the thing. It wasn’t clever of me was it to compare him to Sir Hugh.
‘What?’ He said it twice as if he didn’t understand. ‘WHAT did you say?!’ Then made it quite clear that he did.
‘CONSIDERATION? Is that what you imagine keeps that man at home?’ He made me jump by yelling it right in my face, and then sprang up so suddenly the bench upended, to land me with a thump on the hard floor. ‘A faint-hearted coward. That’s what de Bernay is. And is that what you’d have ME BE?’ he shouted at the tapestry of David and Bathsheba. ‘To make me into a castrated wether bleating in the fold?’
It was the first time I had seen him in a rage. I thought that he looked silly with his hair on end where he had raked it and his dog-brown eyes ablaze – knew I looked silly too, sprawled on the floor and soaked with wine.
And so I laughed. Another big mistake.
What I regret about that night was that it was the first, the only time I lost my temper with her. She said it took more courage to stand out against men’s expectations than to prove myself a hero, and in the need to tell her she was wrong I found my voice. But not the voice I would have chosen if I’d been less agitated.
‘Your business is to get a child. You can’t say I have shirked MY duty there,’ I shouted at her with a cruelty I’m ashamed of. Even at the time I knew it was unfair. And then I lost control and overset her in the rushes, and noticed even as I did it that the wine which soaked her night-rail showed the outlines of her belly and her nipples.
She laughed. I was the craven cur again afraid of being mocked. Although looking back I almost have to share the joke of that confused young man’s confused emotions. Outraged yet stimulated. Angry but frustrated. In love with what her body did to his and his to her. Hearing what she said and yet denying who she was, and what she needed.
Did I come even close to knowing her at all before I left the manor? And would I now given the chance? Would there be room for understanding now? Think about it, Garon.
I think that was the time. The moment that I could have turned back from the brink, but didn’t. And I think what makes it even worse is that I knew, but wouldn’t face the fact that she was right.
I spent that night with Jos and Bertram in the room beyond the beam, the first time that I’d done so when the Church permitted otherwise. Hard words are hard to swallow. So neither of us tried. Out in the training field next morning I was glad of someone else to fight, and if I’d ever wavered in my undertaking to be part of the croisade, the thing was settled from that moment forward.
Early in November on All Hallows Day my mother brought prematurely into the world a living child. A stepbrother who might have stood as a reproach to us for failing to conceive a baby of our own, had he not proved too weak to thrive and died within two days of birth.
As soon as news of it reached Haddertun, I left in sheeting rain to ride the four leagues to Meresfeld. Jos saddled up two mounts, my gelded rounsey and a little Powis mare. But being in no mood for company, I left him scowling at my horse’s arse. Even sent the dog back from the outer gate.
Down at the mill I passed a number of our bondmen perched on ladders, lopping willows on the mudsquelch with split sack bonnets on their heads to shield them from the rain. Some of them downed tools when I rode by, and Jordan Smith called out a greeting as I crossed the bridge into the forest.
What I remember mostly of the ride is how the woods felt in rain. With water dripping from the trees. The smell of decomposing leaves. Dank tunnels of contorted limbs and webs of twigs already bare. There were still tales of wolf packs in the wealdwood. But nobody I knew had ever seen or heard one. Smoke rose from sodden hovels in the clearings. Ponies whinnied from their pickets. At Uckfeld Ford beyond the pale of Ashdowne, my horse was forced to shoulder through a herd of wet red cattle up to their hocks in muddy water, and at Ringles Cross where ash gave way to birch, we were caught in a downpour.
I stood beside my mother’s bed in her small upper chamber, waterlogged and dripping like a faulty bung. My little sister, Edmay, came to hold my hand.
‘The baby’s dead,’ she told me with a woeful face. ‘It was too small to play with me, and then it died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said awkwardly. I’ve never been quite comfortable with children or known how to please them. ‘So sorry,’ I repeated to my mother, blotting my wet forehead with a sleeve.
‘Does
sorry
mean you will go back on your decision to leave Haddertun without an heir?’
She’d changed her view. Her child’s loss made the difference in my mother’s mind it seems between my staying and departing.
A little more than two score years of age, that day she suddenly seemed older. Her face was haggard and her voice was cold. Both cheerless as the rain. ‘Or have you brought me news that your wife’s managed to conceive?’ she asked.
I said I hadn’t, but that we were still hopeful.
‘Then for the present I’d remind you of your duty to remain. You were raised from the cradle, Garon, to protect our Haddertun domain, and God alone knows nothing good will come from leaving it.’
And as she spoke I saw mortality in the pinched lines of my mother’s face, and for the first time faced the thought that she might even die while I was off abroad. But what I told her was that for my very life I’d not forswear my oath to the archbishop.
‘While I’m away Elise will need your help to keep a watchful eye on Haddertun and Steward Kempe,’ I added, dropping to one knee beside her chair. Hoping for her understanding and affection. Waiting for her hand to touch me. Remembering the time she took me on her own knee – was it only once? – before they sent me away to Lewes to be trained.
But then a door slammed, followed by the sound of footsteps on the stair. My mother sighed and closed her eyes as if to banish me from sight.
‘Grown man you may be. But I’d slap you if I thought that it would serve a purpose, Garon,’ she said wearily. ‘If you would only listen.’
‘My dear, you waste your patience on him.’ Sir Hugh de Bernay interrupted from the doorway, appearing in a draught of damp air. In hunting gear and mud-caked boots. He crossed his arms, and so at once did I.
‘Much as we all admire his enterprise, I fear Sir Garon’s proof to argument,’ he said, ‘more suited as he is to action, than to any kind of reasoned thought.’
I’d come prepared to tell him I was sorry he had lost a son, but took the bait instead.
‘So tell us pray what suits your brilliance, Sir?’ I burst out – knowing he was taunting me, knowing what he wanted from me, but unable to resist the challenge. ‘Are hunts and tourneys the most dangerous enterprises you’d consider? And are you now become a carpet knight, so craven that you’d rather hide behind a woman’s skirts than risk your life where men are, fighting for Jerusalem?’
‘Ah, for Jerusalem? Is that what so attracts you? A place you’ve studied, I suppose, to understand its history and guarantee its future as a Christian kingdom?’
‘That is enough, the pair of you!’
The harshness of my mother’s tone sent little Edmay into a scrambling retreat. ‘You know as well as I do, Garon, that Hugh’s needed to defend the manors in King Richard’s absence against his brother’s claims. There’s no one in the land who’d trust Earl John as far as they could pitch him.’
She turned to Hugh. ‘And My Lord it would be best I think if you refrained from goading my poor son into worse manners than he has already shown.’
At which de Bernay bowed, as bow he must to she whose fortune governed his. ‘Do not concern yourself my dear. The thing is scarcely in my power. For as far as I can see the only course that’s like to make Sir Garon’s manners worse, is that which he’s embarked on.’
His black eyes glittered. ‘Give the whelp a month of camp life with King Richard, and by comparison with what he will be then you’d judge him now the very soul of courtesy.
‘That is, if you come back alive, boy.’ He arched his brows at me with deliberate provocation.
I had a savage vision of the man in the tournament with my spear stuck through his gaping mouth, wished that it could have been Sir Hugh – and wished him onward to damnation!
‘Oh I’ll come back, you may be sure of that – and come back fit and ready to defend what’s mine.’ My deepest most emphatic voice.
‘We’ll wait with bated breath.’
‘I’m not a whelp Sir, neither. You misname me. Nor yet
your boy
let’s have that clear. Nor have been since I won my belt and spurs.’
The lamplight gleamed on Hugh de Bernay’s teeth. As ever, humour was his chosen weapon and as ever it struck home.
‘Not my boy? My dear young man then, if that is what you’ve grown to be? I’ll treasure the idea of your maturity for every day you’re absent. I vow I’ll and take it out and polish whilst praying for your safe return.’
Long after I had left the manor, I could hear his jeering laughter ring in my head. If I listen I can hear it still.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Every day muhibb, a page of story.’ That’s how Khadija put it in her moonlit garden. Her words alive in me when so much else has died.
‘I’d recommend you make another climb through your own memories. Your history if you like. Climb that long path and then look back to see if you can’t learn from your mistakes.’ That’s what the Bérgé said.
My head above the clouds, adrift from the world of men as I set out my memories in order like tallies on a board, to see what they add up to.
I see King Richard’s citadel across the Narrow Sea above the River Vienne in the Touraine, see it clearly in the pale sunlight of early spring with yellow banners mirrored in the water and fruit trees flowering in its courts. Wheels trundle constantly across the river bridge an arrow’s flight from our camp in the water meadows. Stacked carts labour up the steep approaches to the fortress, pass both ways through the town below. It seems so real, King Richard’s citadel.
More real than I do, looking back.
We never saw the old queen, Eléonore, although we heard that she was in the Chinon fortress – and only ever saw her son the King but once on horseback in the distance. Across the river there was space enough for all of his recruits, and more besides. For knowing what healthy males with cash in hand are like, King Richard brought in whores, a second army of them, shipped in by wagon-loads from Tours and Angers to keep his soldiers out of mischief.
I shared my tent with Jos and Bertram. Alberic and John slept with the horses in the canvas stables they’d erected for them near the river – where the pair of them proceeded to reduce the scale of the great muster to something they could cope with, and compare unfavourably with Sussex.
‘Pon my carcase, I’ve seen a tidy sight more
sheep
’un this at Lewes any fair day,’ said Albie in field Engleis of the huge tent city.