Troubadour

by Mary Hoffman

  Maria of Montpellier put on her blue silk gown and got her maid to brush her hair till it crackled. She had wrested the lordship of the city back from her half-brother a few years ago and now she was enjoying being ruler. Marriage, pregnancy and childbirth had not got in her way. She had her two little daughters, Matilda and Petronilla, living with her in the castle and tonight they would join in the celebrations for their baby brother.

  She hoped they would never be in bitter feud with him as she had with her half-brother Guilhem. They certainly seemed to dote on him now. Maria looked fondly down at the infant in his crib. How could anyone not love him? With his tiny pink fingernails and downy black hair? She shook herself and stood up extra straight. The Lady of Montpellier would not achieve her ends by sentiment but by skilful negotiations and political adroitness. She would write to the Pope about her son’s inheritance as soon as the Christening celebrations were over.

  The great hall of the castle of Montpellier could hardly have been more different from the improvised stage in the market. Lucatz had made sure that all his troupe wore their best clothes, which would have been a problem for Elinor, who had only one boy’s outfit, but Huguet lent her a tight purple velvet surcoat and Perrin had bought her a pair of velvet slippers to match.

  The joglaresas were magnificent in full-skirted dresses of crimson, green and yellow. They had all washed and curled their hair and every member of the troupe wore brightly coloured ribbons, some of them bought that day in the market.

  As usual they would not eat till after the performance, but Lucatz told them that the Lady herself had given orders to the kitchen to hold back enough of every dish and course to feast the entertainers well.

  They watched the diners from a minstrels’ gallery at the far end of the hall from the table where the Lady Maria sat.

  ‘Look at her,’ said her namesake, Maria the joglaresa. ‘Isn’t she beautiful? I hope I have a figure like hers after three children.’

  ‘Hah,’ said Pelegrina. ‘Worry about that when you have a man to give you some.’

  ‘Hush!’ said Bernardina. ‘Marriage and children aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Why, even the Lady herself, with her fine blue gown and her fine baby boy, is at loggerheads with her husband. And he’s her liege lord into the bargain.’

  ‘Stop gossiping,’ said Perrin. ‘We are the Lady’s guests tonight and we shan’t feel the lack of a lord. Look, I think the senescal is about to give the signal for the entertainments to begin.’

  The little band of musicians who had been playing in the gallery throughout the dinner now yielded place to another group. Down below in the hall the acrobats and dancers of that troupe began a lively performance accompanied by their instrumentalists above.

  ‘They’re good,’ said Huguet. ‘You have to admit it.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Elinor, alarmed. Up in the gallery they had a boy singer of about her age, with a pure treble voice and with a presence to rival Esteve’s. To her surprise, Lucatz came and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t compare yourself with others, Esteve,’ he said kindly. ‘I back my troupe against any in the Midi and, until we catch up with Ademar, you are part of my troupe.’

  Their time came to perform and they passed the outgoing troupe who waved good-naturedly. Lucatz and the dancers, jugglers and acrobats went down into the great hall and the joglars and joglaresas positioned themselves to play and sing from the front of the gallery. Halfway through, the three joglaresas also went down into the hall, leaping and whooping among the other dancers, swinging their petticoats and clapping their hands.

  But they weren’t as raucous and rowdy as Elinor had seen them in the villages. This was still Eastertide, after all, and the welcoming of a new soul into the family of the Church.

  There was a pause in the dancing and the senescal brought a request from the Lady herself that they should perform the lay of Tristan and Iseut. Elinor was surprised. It was a sad story with no happy ending for the lovers but maybe it suited the Lady’s view of her present situation, though she had committed no adultery. Rumours had been rife in the market but all agreed it was King Pedro who had been the unfaithful party.

  More importantly, this was a canso with a large part for the joglar with the highest singing register. So Esteve would have to be on the top of his form.

  Elinor stepped forwards in her purple surcoat, feeling hot now and far from composed but she had memorised this lay, called ‘Chevrefeuille’ or ‘Honeysuckle’, among others by Marie de France, and as she started, the words began to work a kind of magic on her. Everyone was listening to the story – not to the individual joglar who sang it. Elinor or Esteve was just the vessel through which the sad tale passed.

  Tristan was sent to woo the Lady Iseut for his uncle, King Mark, but had the misfortune to fall in love with her himself. His love was returned and the young couple pursued their affair in secret, not wishing for the King to discover it.

  Elinor now came to the climax of the poem, where the banished Tristan carved a signal for Iseut into a hazel tree and a honeysuckle became entwined with it. The honeysuckle was so entangled with the hazel that either would die if the other were uprooted. And so it was with the two lovers, ‘Ni moi sans vous, ni vous sans moi’ – ‘Neither me without you nor you without me’.

  Elinor thought of Bertran as she sang that part and it gave her voice more poignancy. She didn’t exactly feel that she couldn’t possibly live without him, like the honeysuckle and the hazel, but she could imagine what it would be like to feel that and for the duration of the song she did. She looked towards the Lady, who was listening to her so intently. Was she thinking of King Pedro? Elinor had gleaned from the gossip in the market that Pedro was fourteen years older than his wife – not as big a gap as between Iseut and King Mark but perhaps she was now yearning for a young Tristan to adore her. The Lady was still only twenty-two years old.

  The lay of Chevrefeuille came to an end and Lady Maria led the applause. Elinor bowed and Lucatz clapped her on the back.

  ‘Well done, young joglar,’ he said. ‘You have made our fortune tonight.’

  And indeed the senescal himself soon brought a goblet of hippocras especially for ‘the young joglar’ together with a velvet bag of coins. Elinor drank the spiced wine gratefully but handed the bag straight to Lucatz, without counting the coins. He appreciated her gesture but his eyes opened wide to see how much silver it contained. He stowed it away in his jacket but nodded to Elinor as if to say, ‘don’t worry – you’ll have some of it back.’

  Some weeks after Elinor had brought tears to the eyes of Maria of Montpellier’s court as the young joglar Esteve, Bertran, quite ignorant of the donzela’s new life, at last reached Carcassonne. It was a city even more highly fortified than Minerve. Massive walls were punctuated by semicircular towers dating back to Roman times. There was a double gate to get through between the two suburbs outside the city, before the main road approaching the moated Château Comtal in the northeast corner, which had its own fortifications and towers.

  Bertran was shown through all the gates and across the bridge to the château without challenge. The troubadour was a familiar figure in Carcassonne even though the young Viscount had poets and musicians enough of his own. Bertran was not kept waiting long before being shown into the presence of the Viscount himself.

  Raimon-Roger Trencavel at twenty-four was younger than Bertran. But he looked tired, his face lined and sad. He brightened a bit when Bertran was shown in and, dispensing with the formalities, clasped the troubadour in his arms.

  ‘Well met, Miramont,’ he said. ‘It does me good to see you. Sit with me a while and let us drink a cup of wine together and put the world to rights.’

  ‘Ah, sire, if only we could put it to rights,’ said Bertran. ‘But I will willingly drink and talk with you, since there is much to talk about.’


  ‘Have you heard the latest news from the north?’ asked Trencavel, when the servants had gone and the two men were drinking companionably in the Viscount’s private room.

  ‘Tell me, sire,’ said Bertran.

  ‘The Pope has written direct to the nobles, asking them to take up arms against my uncle.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bertran. ‘What about King Philippe-Auguste?’

  ‘His Holiness has not written to him this time, they say. But I don’t imagine he will be happy if his barons take their soldiers and head south to please the Pope.’

  ‘What does your uncle say?’ asked Bertran.

  ‘I haven’t seen him. But he has brought this trouble on himself. He should never have promised the Legates that he would persecute the Believers. The Pope was bound to keep him to his word.’

  The two men were silent for a while, drinking their wine and each thinking his own thoughts.

  ‘You heard about the murder of the Legate?’ asked Bertran.

  The Viscount nodded. This was a delicate area. He could hardly tell the troubadour that his uncle had been responsible. But the fact was that Trencavel did not know the truth. He and his uncle, the Count of Toulouse, had not been on good terms for some time.

  ‘I was there,’ said Bertran. ‘I saw the murder and gave chase after the murderer. But I lost him.’

  ‘That is news indeed,’ said the Viscount. ‘I did not know you had been there.’

  ‘I am not proclaiming the fact,’ said Bertran. ‘It would have been all right if I had caught the villain but since he escaped me, there might be those, especially in Rome, who think I was in collusion with him.’

  ‘Surely not. You exaggerate the danger. Who would suspect you of such a heinous crime?’

  ‘That is not what matters anyway,’ said Bertran. ‘It is my belief that, if the Pope is successful in raising a northern army, it will not come only against Toulouse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the Viscount. ‘His argument is with my uncle, no one else.’

  ‘His argument is with the people he calls heretics,’ said Bertran. ‘And with any lord who supports them and is sympathetic to their cause.’

  ‘But that is more or less every lord in the Midi,’ objected the Viscount. ‘None of our cities and bastides could manage without the Believers – or the Jews come to that.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Bertran. ‘And why I have been singing of war and battles in every hill town between here and Saint-Gilles. I do believe that, using this murder as an excuse, the Pope will do everything he can to wage war against every court in the south. Anyway, once there is an army on the rampage, they will not be precise about who is a heretic and who is not.’

  They were both thinking about this when a servant knocked at the door and came and whispered something in the Viscount’s ear.

  ‘And now we have two more pieces of news,’ said Raimon-Roger, his face grave. ‘The Pope has excommunicated my uncle again.’

  ‘That is surely no surprise,’ said Bertran.

  ‘No, indeed, he must be getting used to it,’ said the Viscount.

  ‘If he were a heretic, to be banned from the Sacrament would not mean much to him,’ said Bertran cautiously.

  ‘Nor if he were just a not very devout man but a rebellious and ambitious spirit, as I know him to be,’ said the Viscount, evading the implied question.

  Bertran bowed. He was not going to find out, even from this intelligent man that he counted his friend, whether he or his uncle shared the troubadour’s religion.

  ‘But I said there was another piece of news,’ said the Viscount. ‘My servant tells me that there is a Pope’s man at the outer gate. He seeks one Bertran de Miramont. He thinks that the troubadour might be here and wishes – this is the precise phrase – to “interrogate him”. What shall I do, Bertran? It seems you might be right in one of your surmises at least. The Pope is looking for you.’

  .

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Two Journeys

  The troupe stayed in Montpellier over a week. The Sunday after Easter was the feast day of a Saint Martin who had been a Pope hundreds of years before and Lucatz was insistent that they had to show themselves willing to celebrate the feast.

  ‘Pope Martin was a persecutor of heretics in his day,’ he told the joglars. ‘And there are too many people who believe that we poets and minstrels support the heretics now. We have to show veneration for Saint Martin.’

  Elinor caught the look that Perrin and Huguet exchanged and decided she must ask them about it. So when Lucatz had gone off to organise their next performance, she got the two joglars on their own in the stables of Montpellier’s castle.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘You know something you’re not telling me. And there are whispers in the town.’

  ‘Sometimes it is better not to know too much,’ said Perrin. ‘Then you can plead ignorance if questioned.’

  ‘Questioned!’ said Elinor, alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You heard what Lucatz said,’ said Huguet. ‘Travelling companies like ourselves, particularly the troubadours and joglars, have been suspected of supporting the Believers and of carrying messages between them.’

  ‘And are you saying that is true?’ asked Elinor.

  Perrin shifted uneasily. ‘Sometimes and in some cases, perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘And something has happened? Something that makes our situation more dangerous?’ asked Elinor.

  ‘We’d better tell her,’ said Huguet, looking at Perrin, who nodded briefly.

  ‘There was a murder a few months ago,’ said Perrin seriously. ‘The man who died was Pierre of Castelnau and he was archdeacon of Maguelonne here – a local man.’

  ‘Why was he murdered?’

  ‘He was the Pope’s Legate,’ said Huguet. ‘His official ambassador appointed to suppress the Believers. And he had just come away from a meeting with Count Raimon of Toulouse.’

  ‘That’s why the people of Montpellier are angry,’ said Perrin. ‘They feel that one of their own has been cut down.’

  ‘And the Pope blames the Count of Toulouse,’ said Huguet.

  ‘But how does that make it dangerous for us?’ asked Elinor. She felt at a loss, at sea in a world she didn’t understand.

  ‘Bertran thinks the Pope will take vengeance, not just on the Count but on the entire south,’ said Perrin.

  ‘Bertran said that? When?’

  ‘When he came to Sévignan,’ said Huguet. ‘That’s why he arrived in winter. He was visiting all the bastides sympathetic to the Believers, to warn them.’

  Elinor was gradually beginning to understand. ‘My father . . .’ she said. Fear made her mouth dry. Was this why he had been so anxious to marry her off? Because he thought their castle would be attacked by the Pope? She forced her terror down and tried to listen carefully to what the joglars were telling her.

  Perrin was nodding. ‘I see you know about Lord Lanval’s religion,’ he said. ‘And I think you guess that Huguet and I – and Bertran – share it.’

  ‘But what can the Pope do?’ asked Elinor. ‘And why should he attack Sévignan if it was the Count of Toulouse who ordered the murder?’ She stowed away in her mind the revelation of Bertran’s dangerous religion.

  ‘He can raise an army,’ said Huguet grimly.

  ‘He hasn’t managed to do so yet – though he has tried,’ said Perrin. ‘But this time he has the best excuse ever to go to the French King and ask for help in defeating what he sees as heresy in the south. He’s always wanted to eliminate us.’

  ‘And if an army comes, they won’t stop at Toulouse,’ said Huguet. ‘And they won’t stop at heretics either.’

  Elinor’s head was whirling with all these new ideas and facts. If Bertran was reall
y a Believer of her father’s religion, she could understand better what her mother had meant when she said he would never marry. Elinor didn’t know much about them but she did know that all the Believers aspired to be Perfects before they died. And a Perfect must be celibate, without earthly ties.

  ‘But where is Bertran now?’ she asked. ‘And how did he know about the murder?’

  ‘He saw it,’ said Perrin. ‘And wherever he is, we must all pray he is not in danger.’

  The unexpected visitor from the Pope to Viscount Trencavel’s court was the Bishop of Couserans. The Legate was very nervous about the task he had been assigned. But Innocent had been quite clear: ‘Find Bertran de Miramont, question him and bring him to Saint-Gilles for further interrogation.’

  The Viscount rose and came forward to kiss the Bishop’s ring.

  ‘A thousand apologies, Your Grace,’ said the Viscount. ‘My foolish servant did not make clear to me how distinguished a visitor we had. May I introduce my friend, Bertran de Miramont?’

  The Bishop had been one of the party with Pierre of Castelnau when he was killed and as soon as he was shown into Raimon-Roger’s presence, he had recognised the troubadour. It put him in a quandary, because he remembered very well how eagerly the man had mounted his horse and ridden after the murderer. It was hard to believe he had been part of a plan to kill the Legate.

  The Bishop noticed that the troubadour did not offer him the same homage but the man bowed courteously enough.

  The Viscount sent a servant away to fetch the best wine from the château’s cellar and the Legate seemed mollified, after his lukewarm welcome at the gate.