The second crack, much sharper, is clearly audible above the ringing bells. Rails snap. Planks splinter and an unsupported crossbeam gives way beneath the weight of the next rank of mounted knights.
‘Dear Lord in heaven preserve them!’
The wild commotion on the bridge wrenches Archbishop Baldwin on the further bank straightway from the responses of his
offertorium
to more immediate demands of the Almighty.
‘Oh God be merciful to those engaged upon Thy business!’
An alarm horn, sounding like a cow in pain, blares twice and then is silenced.
A pillar of the bridge, unbalanced, jarred by the descending beam and subject to the full force of the current, turns slowly to break free of its supports and crash sideways with predictable effect against its neighbour – to strike and fell it as one ninepin fells another.
I wish that we could cross that bridge as safely in my memory as those who’d already made the crossing. I wish that I could land our Albie safe and dry beside them. But I can’t.
It happened suddenly, almost without a warning. And yet when I look back it seems as if we moved like men in dreams, with heavy limbs and stupefied reactions.
We’d had to wait all night to cross, felt nothing but relief when finally our column was pushed forward down the ramp and out onto the bridge. The church bells were already spooking Raoul. Then when he heard the hollow sound of his own hooves and felt the wooden boards beneath him tremble, he fought the bit, side-stepping, crabbing, forcing Jos’s rounsey out against the rails.
It was all that I could do to hold him, even with John’s hand firm on his bridle, and we were near halfway across before I knew that something else was wrong. The goad-boys and drovers were forever shouting at their beasts. So their yelling voices told us nothing. It was when we felt the impact, heard the horses screaming, that we began to understand. But by then it was too late.
We watched with a kind of horrid fascination while ranks of horses disappeared, dropped out of view. Twenty horses up the line – then ten – then five, and then but two!
I saw Sir Mark le Jeune go down, as a whole section of the bridge swung back to shoot its living cargo thirty feet into the river. Cascades of bodies, mounts and riders, flailing and colliding with each other’s bodies. Frozen into attitudes of desperate effort. Somersaulting in thin air. And all the time the tail of King Richard’s army kept pushing forward. Pushing us relentlessly, with nowhere else to go but into the abyss.
I saw John skid and fall. Then Jos’s rounsey, jerking sideways to dislodge him from the saddle.
I felt Raoul quiver underneath me – and then, great-hearted when it counted, bunch his haunches to leap forward while he had purchase on the boards.
Then all my pulses leapt and pounded in the way they do when you anticipate an action. With no more time to think, and trusting to my instinct, I screamed, ‘Victoire!’ and kicked the spurs in hard. To launch us both out into space.
We flew! For one unflinching moment I sat a flying horse!
We soared above the churning wreckage. Free-falling. Galloping on air… until the icy water of the Rhône rushed up to swallow us.
I hit the surface with both fists wound in the reins. Legs straight. Both feet braced hard into the stirrups. We bore the fear, the impact and the pain of it down with us to the icy depths. The shock was total, stunning, blanking all else from my mind.
Then silence. The cool darkness of a world without a top or bottom, or any way of knowing where they ought to be.
Then sheer, bloody-minded anger forcing me up to the surface. Spluttering and cursing. Breathing air and gulping in great quantities of river.
Raoul was there before me. Saddle gone. Reins trailing – and automatically I clutched his mane. Shouting heads and flailing arms were all about us in the freezing water. Alive with physical excitement, my first thoughts were of pride that I’d survived. Then gratitude that Jos and John had too. For two of the wet heads were theirs, my squire’s red hair in rat-tails round his ears, John’s dark and shiny as an otter. I offered thanks to God and providence for our good fortune.
‘Fuck!’ Jos couldn’t keep his mouth shut, never could. Not even then when it was threatening to let in the Rhône and take him to the bottom.
‘Fuck the Virgin! Fuck Saint George! Fuck! Fuck, fucking, fucking fuck,’ he gasped – in the belief as he explained it afterwards that a whole bunch of rude words could be helpful when otherwise things weren’t too clever.
The three of us were paddling to keep afloat in the fast-running current. Trying to avoid the rocks. Horses strained to hold their heads above a debris of wooden boards and splintered rails. A huge beam close beside us nudged the floating body of a mule, turning in the water like a great dark fish. Before long boats were bumping through the flotsam, throwing lines to those who clung to spars and rafts of planks. Or clustered round remaining piers.
A helpful inward current where the two rivers merged was probably what saved our lives, and John had hold of Raoul’s bridle by the time that we made landfall. I ached all over and had twisted my right ankle. Jos hobbled in one boot and nursed a bleeding arm, his shirt ripped from the shoulder. John had a black eye and a graze all down the left side of his face. Raoul was shivering from head to foot as he was led to firmer ground. But at least we four were whole and living.
Of Betram, of Alberic, the geldings and the mules there was no sign.
Later in the afternoon, while wounds were dressed and dying animals dispatched, Archbishop Baldwin offered up a special mass beneath a canvas sheet that someone had rigged between the trees, in gratitude for the delivery of all who by God’s mercy had survived.
For those the damaged bridge had stranded, the river crossing was completed in three days – in skiffs, on rafts, and finally by means of a pontoon of barges linked with ropes and topped with every piece of timber the city could supply. Our King himself directed its construction. From our makeshift camp on the far bank we saw him frequently in boats or striding up the river bank. A lofty figure in a long silk tunic glittering with gold. Everyone could hear him shouting orders. His oaths, they said, would shock the Devil into silence. To me he was magnificent.
It was not until the second day that we knew Bertram had survived, along with the locked travel chest which I’d gloomily assumed to be somewhere at the bottom of the river. He found us in the end by following directions to Archbishop Baldwin’s tent. Advancing flat-footedly between the trees. Hatless, with his bald head gleaming and his precious burden wrapped in a concealing cloak.
‘Happened quicker’n a dog can lick his arse. I had the chest safe though an’ no mistake, afore the mules went in,’ he told us, breathing heavily as he set down the coffer in the sand.
‘I found the rail, thanks be. An’ hugged it to me like the kindest friend I had. An’ cried out “Lord God an’ Mother Mary save me!” An’ blame me, so they did.’
Bert blew his nose into his hand and wiped the voiding on his tunic. Then told us that he’d seen poor Albie hit a jagged beam-end as he fell. Which as he said, was a hard lesson for the lad from the Almighty and gave us little hope of finding him alive.
We’d lost both geldings. Lost the mules, and with them all else that we’d brought. Arms, harness, tents, my helmet and my father’s precious hauberk. But thanks to Bert we had the means to buy replacements from the merchants and horse-traders who saw their chance to make a killing in the camp. We bargained for an old camsteery hinny, two scrub ponies, a pair of boots for Jos and four bed-rolls – along with rope and harness, a pair of battered saddles, some javelins and kidney daggers and quite a good two-handed sword. The rest I’d find, so I was told, at armourers and metal-shops in the port of Marseille.
I lay awake the night before we left the camp at Lyons and thought of Alberic’s round hairy face, imagining his bloated body floating in the river. Hoping that it would be found and buried decently. I’d always felt, unfairly, a feeling of contempt for anyone of my own generation who failed to make it. Failed for any reason to survive. But when it came to Albie, what I chiefly felt was guilt. I thought of his poor mother, Ida, back at Haddertun, and how she’d be the day I rode down to her cottage to hand her the archbishop’s mort-pay for her eldest boy. The day I told her how I’d let him die by accident along the way.
I saw her standing in her garden with her grown sons and her two small daughters at her skirts. I saw the mossy thatch behind her. Heard her geese announcing my arrival. Could even catch the scent of Sussex mayweed crushed by Raoul’s hooves. But I couldn’t picture Ida’s face. Maybe because I didn’t want to?
The rest of our long journey south is harder to recall than either of our chevauchées from Chinon or Vézelay. What’s happened since has driven so much from my mind.
King Philippe’s army, along with its Burgundian and yellow-crossed Italian contingents, branched east from Lyons to cross the mountains to the port of Genoa, where ships awaited them for their sea crossing. The rest of us left when we could. No longer in close-order or in sight of Richard’s vanguard. Straggled down the east bank of the river with wide gaps between battalions.
I joined Sir Dickon Waleys’s party, riding Raoul with John beside me resolutely whistling. Jos took the larger of the ponies. Bertram led the hinny and the second pony with the baggage. Footsore, hoofsore, plagued by the stinging flies the peasantry call ‘shimmeroys’, we trudged the dusty road. Each day we watched the sun rise in the heavens and sink into the crags. Too hot and tired to find the heart for croisade hymns. Backs turned on all we’d left behind, we were drawn south relentlessly like migrant birds to Marseille and the Middle Sea.
CHAPTER THREE
I do think the scent of fresh-made hay is one of the best smells in the world! It’s so good to see things grow and be a part of life’s great cycle. Even if it isn’t happening inside you as it ought.
I knew within a week of Garon’s leaving that I’d failed to catch his child. But why do we women have to bleed each month? I’ve never understood it. It can’t be that the flux-blood’s of a child that’s failed to form, like churned milk that refuses to make curd – because I bled for years before I took in Garon’s seed.
Maman always called the reds ‘the curse of Eve’, sent as a punishment for what she did to Adam. But I can’t see why the Everlasting would decide to make us bleed and suffer pain as a part of His great plan – when He could just as easily, and far more usefully, let women yield a quart of fresh milk every month. Or a hogshead of red claret? Is that too much to ask of He For Whom All Things Are Possible?
‘Glory lamb, I don’t see as ye’ve any call to blame yourself,’ Hod offered me by way of compensation as she wadded moss into the linen diaper I have to wear. ‘’Tis one thing less to fret about, that’s eyeproof.’
So that’s that, is it? A fault without a remedy? No baby, or means of getting one without a mortal sin or an immaculate conception?
For some days after Garon left I found myself in a completely hopeless state. Angry frequently. But more often listless and lethargic, unable or unwilling to perform the simplest tasks – forlorn; a bolster-case without its feather stuffing. But then you can get used to most things given time. It’s very rare for me to keep a feeling going for more than five days at a stretch – and by the end of the first week I was quite well enough to ride to Lewes with my husband’s steward to pay the old Jew his March interest.
Sometimes, it seems to me, my marriage is all in the past. As far away as Lancaster. As unreal as a story in a chanson. Sometimes I hardly mind that he has gone to leave me to my own devices. (That’s with my busy ‘lady-of-the-manor’ head on, when regrets aren’t worth a pauper’s groat. Although with my other ‘Eve-cast-from-the-garden’ head in place, I tend to find I want him back.) I’m really not sure what I feel. Do I still love him? Did I ever love him? Or did I just love what he did when things were going well?
SIR GARON. GARON, GARON…
I like the sound of it, his name, enjoy repeating it – it somehow makes him seem more real. And if only he’d come back, I daresay I’d forgive him. Men can’t help what they are, Hod says. He’s probably no worse than any other – however rough he was, or clumsy in the way he used me.
He forced me that last time – but never struck me. You’d have to call him gentle in that way. On the other hand I never got to know him well enough to guess what he’d do next, and can’t guess any better now he’s gone. And now I come to think of it, I can’t say I’ve known any man that well. Father hardly counts. I’ve yet to spend so much as a full day with either of my sisters’ husbands. As for Sir Hugh – he’s far too busy trying to impress to let any woman know what HE’S about!
But I still miss him (I mean Garon). Despite the way he treated me, the way he left, I miss him telling me I’m beautiful. I miss his grunts and groans in bed, his open mouth, the joyful bellows that burst out of him – the sounds, not of a man’s power over a woman, but of a woman’s over him! Is it a sin to miss that kind of power the most?
Oh Mary Mother, Mater Dei, protect my Garon from an injury, or worse!
Shall I count a thousand Aves as I say them? Would that be enough to see him safe and bring him home? My lady-of-the-manor head tells me that he’s unlikely to return, and that I wouldn’t be the first or last to lose a husband to a stupid male idea of enterprise and conquest. Yet still I stand and stare at the ash path that leads up to the manor gate, to picture him appearing in the distance. Or think of him surprising me at my loom. Or on my palfrey in the meadows, casting up my little merlin. Or in the laundry or the pantry, to see how well I’ve settled down to managing the manor in his absence. I even catch myself in conversation with him, asking his opinion, finding things for him to say which he would never think of. Almost expecting to look up and see him – I’ve had so strong a feeling that I might.