It was as well I didn’t know until he’d left, that Steward Kempe had come to see the moneylender after Michaelmas, to pay the quarter-day interest on Sir Garon’s loan – and pay it in the name of Sir Hugh de Bernay of all people – for the man, he told the Jew, who was now managing the Haddertun estate!
‘I could not tell him you had paid it, Lady,’ Jacob added to the news that Kempe had stood so recently downstairs, not twenty feet from where I sat.
‘In part it may have been a test to see if you were here.’ Old Jacob tapped his nose with a forefinger to show his wisdom. ‘But I can play that game as well as Master Kempe,’ he said. ‘I hid the place from him on the heskem, to trace the line I had already marked, and when the business was concluded, begged to send my duty to the lady of the manor, and ask if you were in good health.’
‘What did he have to say to that, the rogue?’
‘He said he was surprised I had not heard his Lady had absconded with the profits from the manor harvest.’
‘He dared accuse me of a theft?’
Damn the man and blast him! I knew he’d never liked me!
‘He said you’d left the manor and abandoned all depending on your management. He claimed it was the talk of all the district.’
‘But I was raped, attacked! I wasn’t safe. How could I stay?’
I fear I shouted at poor Jacob, as if he was the one I must convince – while Sara hurried off to bring a stool, and make me sit before I did myself a mischief.
‘They must know what Sir Hugh has done? They saw my injuries. My maid must surely have accused him?’
‘Master Kempe said nothing of it,’ the old man told me gently. ‘He said Sir Hugh has paid the interest from his funds at Meresfeld, and plans to manage both estates until My Lord the Earl rules on the matter. He said your maid believes you may have travelled north to Lancaster from whence you came.’
And in the middle of it all, I took a moment to thank Hoddie for that piece of inspiration – guessing that she’d had to keep the peace for Edmay’s sake, and knowing how she must be worrying. I could hardly wait to send for her, but had to. I couldn’t send for Hod until I’d seen the Earl and Countess, and was sure of their protection.
The Countess came at last in the third week of October, when the leaves of all the oaks outside the town were turning bronze – as was, to my disgust, the skin around my nipples.
Jacob had it of a debtor that the Earl was to remain in London while the Countess spent her Hallowmas at Lewes. He offered, bless the man, to help me frame my argument. But I had spent too much time on my own up in his attic, not to have practiced it a hundred times, and have it word for word!
My Lady kept me waiting for the best part of an hour, before she sent down to the castle gate-house, to say that she’d receive me. A page escorted me across two baileys – to a modest third floor chamber in the keep, where the Countess had a chimney-hearth all to herself.
‘You say he raped you?’ She turned my statement back into a question. ‘How many times?
‘Once was enough, My Lady, for I’m with child and pray he may be punished for the injury he’s done me.’ It was the first phrase I’d rehearsed and caused a murmur of excitement amongst her waiting ladies.
‘He did it only once and you’re with child?’
Seated by the hearth with one dog on a cushion in her lap and two more in a basket at her feet, My Lady’s face when she examined me was frigid. ‘And when exactly do you claim that this occurred?’
‘At harvest time, My Lady, Saint Augustine’s week.’
‘And how long is it since his wife, the Lady Constance, died?’
‘She died soon after Christmas ten months ago.’
‘Ten months, as long ago as that? Well we all know what stallions are when they’re denied a mare.’ The Countess glanced around her women, who obliged her with a titter.
‘Does that excuse them rape?’
I hadn’t meant to sound so angry. It wasn’t how I planned to speak. The words came by themselves. ‘You call him a stallion, and the law demands he should be gelded if it’s proven.’
The Countess turned back to consider me and ask my age. For once without its wimple, her neck was circled with a string of yellow topaz the size of pigeons’ eggs – the skin beneath them positively scrotal!
I told her I’d be twenty-three next month.
‘Your husband?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘And was he able to perform as a man should to validate the marriage?’
‘He was, My Lady.’
‘And for how long did you share a bed before he left for the croisade?’
‘For a little more than five months, My Lady’. Another question I’d expected.
‘You lay for five months with a young and lusty man, and conceived no child?’ The passionless, poached eyes regarded me attentively. ‘Yet from a single tumble with Sir Hugh you have contrived to quicken.’
I said I couldn’t help how it appeared. ‘It is the truth,’ I blurted, stung into incivility again by the suspicion in her voice. ‘Believe me I would not deceive you, Lady. I swear it on my mother’s life.’
‘What I choose to believe is neither here nor there – and whether the man forced you once, or fifty times, is immaterial,’ she told me stonily. ‘As is your claim to have resisted.’
‘But I DID! I tried to fight him off. He hit me and he raped me!’
‘And who was there as witness?’
‘No one.’
‘Your word against the man’s?’
She knows I speak the truth but doesn’t care, I thought – and recklessly plunged on.
‘He raped me, and will go on to rape the Haddertun demesne. I know he will if you allow it.’
She didn’t answer that at once. The whole place held its breath. Then – ‘If you wish to continue with this interview, I would advise you to compose yourself,’ My Lady snapped, ‘and listen carefully to what I am about to tell you. In all appeals of rape, the practice in Crown Court is to establish at the outset if the plaintiff was a virgin at the time of ravishment. In your case, after five months in your husband’s bed, I see no likelihood of that being true. It follows therefore that you have no legal claim against Sir Hugh.’
I begged her pardon for my ignorance, knowing I’d said too much already. ‘But are you saying that in law, My Lady, a married woman cannot in any circumstance be raped?’
‘Naturally.’
She looked at me with something like surprise. ‘We seal a letter to prevent it being read by those who have no right to do so. But once the seal is broken, there can be no way of knowing who has read it. Or how many times.’
Between her thumb and fingernail the Countess cracked a flea she’d found behind her lapdog’s ear. ‘I’m willing to believe that in this instance you were forced,’ she acceded. ‘But that will not excuse you in the eyes of other men. We are all women here, and may say frankly that the act itself contains an element of force, as all wives are aware. Men seldom make distinctions between a willing and unwilling woman.’ She sniffed. ‘It comes naturally to men to treat us badly. And since it’s men who make the laws, you may be sure they make them for their own advantage. Which is to tell you once again, you have no case.’
She didn’t soften it or say ‘my dear’, would never stoop to anything so frivolous. I felt like some poor beast bred only to be chased, caught in the meshes of men’s laws and men’s desires, speared for their sport.
‘But what of the Haddertun domain?’ I said in a defeated voice. ‘So is Sir Hugh to have the manor too?’
‘The land’s another matter altogether.’
My Lady’s stern expression and brisk change of manner made it clear that we were talking now of far more serious concerns. ‘Our canon law seeks to protect the land of absent crucesignati. But judgements out of Rome are easier to make than to enforce – and we must face the fact that all our territory across the River Ouse is at risk of incursion by Earl John, who’s brother to the King. My Lord of Warenne is in London at this present to uphold the government of the Queen’s Justiciar against the Earl.
‘So it may be as well for the defence of Haddertun,’ the Countess considered, ‘to keep Sir Hugh in place there to defend it.’
‘But you’d not send me back there to him?’
My faith in justice and fair dealing faltered in the face of that unfeeling woman. ‘My Lady, you would not abandon me to one who seeks my ruin?’
The Countess frowned. ‘What I will send to Hugh de Bernay is an instruction to hold the Hadderton domain against incursion through these unsettled times,’ she said. ‘I will assure him we have every confidence in his intention to uphold the rights of his departed lady’s son, against the day that he returns to claim them. For if he fails to do so, the land will naturally escheat to My Lord of Warenne. I will inform Sir Hugh that I’ve removed my kinswoman, his step-daughter by marriage, into my household for her better safety.’ Again the yellow stare. ‘I trust that satisfies?’
I curtsied gratitude.
‘In the meanwhile you may be interested to hear that King Richard has now taken Acre, and expects to be in Jerusalem by Christmas.
‘So by the time your child is born, in April or in May?’ My lady’s probing eyes moved from my breasts down to my belly. ‘Well, shall we say by spring – the croisade will most like be over, and our soldiers of the cross returned. With a fair wind we’ll have a king again in England by Eastertide, and I dare swear you’ll know by then if you’re a widow or a wife.’
The Countess stooped to settle her dog into the basket with the others, and rose to indicate the interview was drawing to a close.
‘I think it might be best if I were to find a decent woman, to raise this child of yours for you somewhere away from England. Always supposing it survives the birth,’ she added, brushing dog hairs from her gown.
‘But what if I should wish to keep it?’
And what on God’s earth made me say that, when the offer plainly made good sense? Was it old Sara and the blessings she attached to babies? Or something more to do with the strange stirrings I’d begun to feel each time the little creature moved?
‘It is your right to keep it, naturally. But I’d advise against it. As we’ve agreed, men see things differently to women,’ My Lady pointed out. ‘When he returns from the croisade, IF he returns – your husband may insist you’re parted from the child. Which will be all the harder for you when it’s grown.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Pisan Harbour, Acre: October 1192
CROISADE; THE BITTER END
More than a year has passed since the pyrrhic victory of Arsuf. King Richard finally leaves Palestine on the Feast Day of Saint Denys early in October, having sent ahead of him his wife and sister and pubescent mistress to make their own way home as best they may. Jerusalem was never sieged, let alone recaptured; and the Kings’ Croisade which began at Vézelay with stirring cries of
Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!
– ends on the royal galley in near silence.
The Sultan Salahuddin’s strategy of harassing and demoralising the Christian armies to the point where they’re too weak to mount another siege, has been successful. At Arsuf he reduced King Richard’s cavalry to less than half its strength. At Joppa and at Ascalon he blocked the harbours and destroyed the towns’ defences to deny them to the Christians. But he left intact the orchards about Joppa as a distraction for their troops. A ploy which proved remarkably effective.
‘There were so many grapes and figs, pomegranates, almonds growing in plenty round about, large fruits wherewith the trees were laden, that the host took them without price and were greatly refreshed,’ one Christian annalist recorded. ‘The army remained there long, enjoying indolence and pleasure. Their sins grew daily upon them; whores came to them from Acre to stir up their passions and multiply misdeeds.’
Hearing from the prostitutes that in Acre the taverns had re-opened, and that ships were leaving daily from its harbours, a steady trickle of defectors began to make their way back up the coast – while outside Joppa, even Richard found time to relax. He went off hawking in the ilex woods behind the coastal plain. He sent to Acre for his wife and sister and the (no-longer-maidenly) Princess of Cyprus, to join him in his orchard camp – and there, to everyone’s surprise, arranged to meet the Sultan’s brother, Sayfuddin al-Adil ibn Ayyub, beneath a flag of truce.
At a banquet in the royal pavilion, gifts were exchanged and fantastic promises extended. Al-Adil presented the English King with a copy of the Qur’an bound in emerald kidskin, a matched set of seven near-white camels and a damascened campaign tent. In return, King Richard offered his own sister, the Queen of Sicily. If Sayfuddin would but renounce his faith, Jehanne was his to wed and bed, her brother promised with a warm and friendly smile. Then together (and what could possibly be neater?) the pair of them could rule Jerusalem as its new King and Queen!
But if Sayfuddin, who’s brief was to delay al-Malik Rik as long as possible at Joppa, appeared to see the sense of the proposal, Jehanne most definitely did not. Her fury when she heard of it was said to equal anything their carpet-chewing father could produce. She shrieked that she’d as soon cut off her hand, as give it in marriage to a Moslem. Without in any way intending to be funny, she added that she’d rather take to bed a loathsome, yellow-spotted cacodemon with horns and hooves and a spiked tail worn front-to-back, than a black infidel with a platoon of other wives – concluding with some pertinent remarks about her brother’s character and carnal preferences, that ended turning Richard’s face the same royal purple shade as hers. Meantime, while Sayfuddin pretended to consider the English King’s outrageous plan in Joppa, his brother, Salahuddin, was treating with Conrad in Tyre, for an alternative and smaller Latin Kingdom linked to France.