‘But you told me the Mussulmen do not drink wine…’
‘They use this liquor for other purposes.’
‘Did you make it yourself?’ I asked. ‘Is this the fire-water?’
‘Yes, but you must not talk about it yet. There is a time for things. I have used it several times on injuries in the sickroom, to clean the wounds. It is a powerful thing, and needs to be kept carefully.’
‘But you told me knowledge was to be shared?’ I said, impertinently.
‘Not if it can also do harm and make men sick,’ he told me, reprovingly.
I promised him that I would not speak of any of this unless he wished it. He was a good man and a good friend to me, and he had given me much to think about. Time passed pleasantly enough in the abbey infirmary where I worked with Brother Paul. We were excused everything but the major services which usually amounted to three a day, and those during the hours of daylight and evening, not in the shivering midnight of Matins and the early morning Lauds. While we were not tending the ill or infirm, we spoke of mathematics and medicine and distillation and siege engines but never of women, which was a subject I also wanted to investigate. I managed to find a girl in the village when I was sent out to take a nostrum to the sick. She showed me the rudiments – and very rudiment they were – but I could see that Brother Paul disapproved. I was ready for the world, chafing at the predictability of abbey life, but there seemed to be no way out of it, until the message from my father arrived on the eve of my twenty-first birthday.
The Abbot wished me well and gave me a little silver for my journey, and some useful precepts which I am sorry to say I have forgotten. Then I went to say goodbye to Brother Paul. He embraced me and presented me with a portable chest into which he had placed sundry dried herbs and several unguents in sealed bottles, along with a leather-bound missal he had made and inscribed. I quickly established it to be a medicinal missal not a religious one: notes, ingredients and decoctions in al-cohol to help cure common ailments and one or two more complicated ones.
‘Pray God you never have to bore into a man’s skull,’ he said, ‘but if you do, you will find instructions here. It is an operation more frequently needed than you might think in these days of war.’
Enclosed among its pages was a single piece of vellum on which he had written various calculations – everything I needed to practise the new mathematics. I embraced the old man and thanked him for his teaching and his friendship. I believe I may have noticed a tear in his eye for we had grown close in the last months and I had come to look forward to his conversation, and his wisdom drawn from a long life and from encountering many hazards in lands whose names I did not even know. All this I had now to put behind me, and it pained us both that it should be so.
‘Look after yourself,’ the old Jew told me. ‘You have a rare quality. That is, you see too much. What is good is that you have already learned to be careful with it. Don’t seem too clever, or speak too much. Listen and watch, and all will become clear – if you are lucky.’
‘And if I am not?’
‘Then you will have to go forward in a fog like the rest of us,’ he said with a twinkle, although he was the least foggy man I have ever met.
I embraced him and he gave me a small silver object which he said was an amulet. He told me always to keep it about my person and in the last resort to pray to the gods on it.
‘The gods?’ I looked at him in astonishment.
‘Did I say that?’
There was a twinkle in his lizardy old eyes.
‘Remember, if you ever have to tally, use the Arab numerals for money-in and money-out. They are worth more than a bag of gold,’ he told me, ‘or even a bright sword to hang by your side.’
‘You have given me so much,’ I told him, ‘and I have given you so little.’
‘More than you think,’ he said.
I embraced him again, and took a last walk round the abbey, saying goodbye to my friends. I think the Brothers, though they lamented my departure and begged me to change my mind, were quite relieved to see the back of me – perhaps I was becoming a little wild. Brother Hubert who looked after the stables lent me a little black palfrey which I promised to send back to him, though he said I need not and it was a parting gift from the abbey.
So, in borrowed clothes from the abbey’s charity-chest, armed with a curious old sword which Brother Paul had saved from a dying veteran (for the roads were full of those who wished you no good whether you were English, French or Norman), and bolstered by the power of nought, I made my way on the little black nag which I named Blackberry. We ambled down daffodil lanes, through Rugles, L’Aigle and Notre-Dame D’Après, back towards the place where I had been born. It was the Ides of March.
And now I have brought us back to where I started and I can pick up the tale.
V
After my meeting with Juliana, Comtesse de Breteuil, by the curtain wall, I lived in a ferment of anxiety to see her again. My experience of women might have been slim, but instinct is everything, and sometimes you know that you have met the right person, one of the people in the world who carries a special secret only you can understand.
The feasting at the castle went on for days during which I glimpsed her several more times. I even spoke to her when I happened to brush past her in hall, formally and with a low voice as befitted my station, but there was no opportunity to rekindle the candour of our conversation by the castle wall. Perhaps it was best forgotten. There were many cautionary tales concerning young men who entertained thoughts of love towards high-born women, and they all ended disastrously.
Once Easter was over, the cellarman (my stepfather) began with all his customary charmlessness to instruct me in the mysteries of the wine trade which, I have to say, he knew backwards: the different types of wine, the best way to store the barrels, how to tell a bad wine from a good one (my untutored taste was for the sweeter wines like Malvasia), how long to keep a good one, what kind of bottle to use, how to veil flavour and add taste with herbs and how to mask a bad wine with spices, how much to pay and when to buy, how to account for every drop of wine drunk in the castle …
I liked wine but found little opportunity to drink much of it. Small instructive sips were all the old red-nose would allow. He guarded his barrels jealously, sometimes even sleeping down in the fragrant vaults. I think it was because of this tendency that the Comte was able to steal into the nuptial bed.
I have to confess that my stepfather was a sound teacher. If I had had six months of his tuition instead of several weeks I would have been able to take his place when he journeyed in October to the vineyards of Anjou – and give a good account of myself with my tally of wine out and in when he returned. I had already devised a way of using the Arabic numbers that was far quicker than the cumbersome method the old man used. In his tight-fisted and begrudging way he was almost grateful for my work, but I was careful to copy everything I wrote into the old tally system of notches on a stick. I was not going to give up my secret numbers and my nought yet.
However, my future in the wine trade was not to be. I was crossing the castle bailey one day, a couple of weeks after Easter, feeling sorry for myself because the excitements were over, the mood in the castle was flat, and I was in love. The Prince had already returned to his father, and the Comtesse Juliana and her husband had gone back to the castle of Breteuil. I was crossing, as I say, like a lovesick lamprey, when I felt a terrific blow between the shoulders. I staggered and nearly dropped the small firkin I was carrying. Brother Paul had taught me that it is dangerous to strike in that place unless it is in battle, for it can incapacitate a man.
‘Ha!’
It was my father, the Comte, smiling like an alchemist’s crocodile.
‘What are you doing carrying wine, boy?’
‘Helping the cellarer, sir.’
‘Is this what we educated you for? Did you learn Latin to carry wine?’
‘No, sir.’
‘My wife’s
sister, the Comtesse de Breteuil, wants you to tutor her two girls. Is that rather more your métier, do you think?’
My heart leapt, this was the summit of all my wishes, something I had not even dared hope for, but I had to be careful not to show excitement or gratification. These things were so easily stamped upon.
‘I should think so, sir.’
I adjusted my face to resignation. A thought had struck me.
‘Sir?’
‘Try not to waste my time. I have a great deal on my mind.’
All he had on his mind was humping one of the laundrywomen – sturdy girls like the one who was William the Conqueror’s mother. Word was that my father’s Comtesse wouldn’t have him near the bedroom.
The favourite pastimes for a baron like my father were whoring, hunting and soldiering. Father enjoyed the hunt but wasn’t much of a one for soldiering, although occasionally he had to send a few knights with some Percheron cavalry to march with Duke Henry for his various struggles. The Duke was always struggling with someone – the King of France, for instance – and on the whole he seemed to win. Then again, at other times, he seemed to lose. He had friends and, then again, he had many enemies (including his brother, the previous Duke, a hopeless case, whom he had fought and imprisoned for life).
I became aware that my father was waiting for me to say something.
‘Your wife’s sister, sir?’ I asked, feigning stupidity.
‘The Comtesse de Breteuil. Try not to be as simple as you look. She met you and formed a good impression of you, God knows how, when she was here for the Prince’s feast. She is the Comtesse de Breteuil. Saddle up. Take a horse but not one of the big ones. That nag you brought from the abbey will do. Pack some decent clothes if you have any, and take the road to Verneuil and then on to Breteuil itself. Play it right and you may come back a better man.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Don’t disappoint me now. She is not to be crossed.’
I was beside myself with joy. The beautiful Comtesse had asked for me. Of course, I was young in those days and easily excited. My arrogance at that time still takes my breath away.
‘I will do my best not to cross her, my lord. Nothing shall stand in the way.’
His face softened momentarily. Perhaps he was remembering my mother. Anyway, he threw me a purse with some silver in it.
‘Don’t spend it all on women, boy. It was your father’s little weakness, but he could afford it.’
It was the first time he had ever referred to his paternity, and I was too surprised to speak, but before I could recover myself he had turned and was gone.
Before I left, I looked for the pretty Comtesse, my stepmother, to say goodbye to her out of courtesy, but she could not be found. Probably she was hiding in a quiet corner of the castle, not easy to locate, thinking about her prince. I had always found the cheese-house another good place for a quiet cuddle, but it was scullion’s stuff and not suitable for the king’s daughter, although I did look in there too because I thought Matilde might have a message for her sister Juliana.
Juliana. A lovely name, don’t you think? A lady’s name. One not to be trifled with and smacking of Imperial Rome, about which I had learned at the monastery. Brother Paul had managed to find copies of Ovid and Virgil and even Horace and Livy in the library. And Sallust’s History of Rome, mustn’t forget Sallust, he said, and Suetonius. I had steeped myself in the grandeur of the eternal city and the foibles of its inhabitants. There was nothing they could not teach us about treachery, brutality, glory, honour and the game of love.
When I told the cellarer, my stepfather, of the Comte’s command, though he could not very well argue with it, he was considerably put out. I did not explain that, ever since I had come back to the castle, I had been intent on leaving it again. A world was out there full of new things, new ideas coming up from the Pays d’Oc, things I wanted to see. Now, though I would actually be going twenty miles to the north-east, it was a start; anywhere away from Mortagne seemed like a gate to the south.
As I was saddling up Blackberry, my little black nag – who greeted me with a whicker and a wag of the head as if to say ‘What? More trouble?’ – two people in succession came to see me off. The first was my half-brother Robert, who suggested that I had been sent away because no one wanted me around.
‘Be sure not to come back too soon, if at all,’ he said, and slunk off towards the kitchen (where they would give him cakes because he was the lord’s son) before I could kick his arse.
The second was the Comtesse Matilda with one of her maids, who was instructed to stand a little apart from us.
‘You are going to Breteuil?’
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘Tell my sister, the Comtesse, how much I miss her. I feel quite dead without my family. Will you tell her that? She will understand.’
I understood, too, having seen something of her particular involvement with her family. I felt a little mouse of sympathy, scuttling away somewhere at the back of my mind, for my oaf of a father who could not know about her unsisterly interest in the prince. She held out her hand, and I kissed it.
Every window in the castle seemed to have someone watching as I pricked out on Blackberry towards the gatehouse and the road to adventure …
VI
My journey to Verneuil, the first stop on my itinerary, was comparatively uneventful, though nothing is completely uneventful for a young man on a fine spring day. The may blossom was out early, my horse was healthy and I was going to see the beautiful Comtesse Juliana. Along the track the trees were putting out leaves of astonishing, almost impudent, greenness, and larks were singing high overhead. Sometimes I would pass a shepherd leading sheep towards the pasture or a serf taking cows out to a water meadow. Once, near the village of St Anne, a pretty milkmaid crossed the road, carrying her pails from the farmyard to the dairy, and I gave her good day. I was tempted to stop and ask her for a bowl of milk, and tell her how beautiful she was, but I remembered my Comtesse who was waiting for me, and I kept myself from straying, though it pained me to feel the girl’s eyes following me down the road.
There is nothing wrong with admiring a pretty girl, just in case you think I was being disloyal. According to Plato, beauty in all its forms composes the spirit. And there is something fascinating about girls. Not just what you are thinking I’m thinking, but their entire otherness. You’d think the same if you’d been a mewed-up lad in a monastery from the age of fourteen to twenty-one.
I had to keep going because Verneuil was sixteen miles away, and I did not want to be late into town. I had been given the name of an inn there where I could pass the night, but I wanted to locate it by daylight and see the place. Everything was new that spring in 1118 anno Domini.
The road entered a forest, but it was fine and open, neither witches’ wood nor robbers’. There were other travellers on the road. It was a little early for the Duke’s campaigning season, but already there were signs of activities to come: supplies being moved and soldiers deployed to mount sieges on tactical castles. Occasionally I passed groups of men plodding along behind mounted knights bearing the colours of the Duke’s allies, although there was one band of crossbowmen – a better class of soldier, so it was said – who sported the crest of Bellême and who stopped me and asked me my business.
‘I am a Latiner,’ I told them.
This was the briefing I had had from Brother Paul when I questioned him about life on the road.
‘When in doubt, say you’re a Latiner. People respect that. It means you are more or less a priest.’
It seemed to work now, though they asked me to say something in Latin.
‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,’ I said, falling back on good old Virgil.
‘What does that mean?’ asked a burly archer who seemed to be their leader.
‘I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts,’ I said.
The monks had been mad about Virgil. They needed some alternative excitement in their lives �
�� more than an occasional visit of the bishop could provide. They secretly loved Ovid and his Amores too but always said they preferred Virgil.
‘I don’t know about Greeks, but I do know about gifts. Got any?’
I was all at once very conscious of the purse which lay hidden under the sack containing my clothes and paltry possessions.
‘I certainly have,’ I told him, ‘the gift of benediction and God’s grace. Bless you, my sons. Deus vobiscum.’
I made the sign of the Cross at him. I would have made a good monk.
‘Hm,’ he said, not totally convinced. ‘Let’s see what’s in that sack of yours, Latiner.’
‘Look,’ I shouted, pointing back down the road, ‘My lord Perche’s soldiers!’
They all turned to look, and I spurred Blackberry in the opposite direction. She sprang forward like a trebuchet stone. I half expected a volley of arrows up our backsides, but I was told later by one of the castle guard at Breteuil that archers never shoot unless it is to kill. They do not waste arrows, nor do they like to waste time having to retrieve them – which they must do since arrows cost money and are made with skill and craft. Breteuil and Bellême were not officially enemies. They might have had some explaining to do to William Talvas (Bellême’s son and, like his father, a thorn in the Duke’s side) if they had killed a Latiner belonging to his neighbour. Besides, the road was a little too public for a daylight murder. You never knew who might come round the corner.
I was lucky. These were funny times: soldiers on the road and no one quite knew who was on which side.
I reached Verneuil as the church bell was tolling Vespers. I was sure I had been told to take the left fork of the road as I neared Verneuil but, as it turned out, that was the road to L’Aigle and I wasted half an hour before I discovered my mistake. I have a tendency to muddle left and right at moments of decision. Anyway, I still had an hour or so to spare before dark.
The White Ship Page 3
