We bathed in those few minutes as if the bed were a wooden tub and the maids were pouring warm water over us. But why me? I thought. Why me? It was a question that I knew a lover should not ask, even then. I was suddenly, shamefully, conscious that if her lord found us I would probably be castrated, and blinded for good measure. He would enjoy it.
She had the trick of reading my mind.
‘He never comes up here, night or day, and nor will anyone. The Comte will be arriving back at the castle in an hour or two. But now we perhaps should meet the children. I want you to make them clever but not too clever, and certainly the happiest little girls this side of the Channel. Their father doesn’t want them. He thinks they should have been boys so they could have grown into knights. I will not have more of his children. He cannot. He was injured in a tournament. I will not have him anyway in my bed.’
‘I will love the girls all the more,’ I said. ‘There are better things to be than knights.’
‘That’s my bastard,’ she said, kissing me.
I was only young but I thought: this is the thing. You don’t feel that often in life, do you?
She started to get up and I lay and watched her as if I had known her all my life, as if we did this every afternoon.
‘You are beautiful,’ I said, ‘beyond the dreams of little boys in monasteries.’
‘My father betrothed me to the Comte when I was ten years old,’ she said. ‘It was none of my wishing. He said he needed Eustace on his side, and that is what kings’ daughters have to do. My father put a number of noses out of joint by appointing Eustace Comte, because he was not the only one up for it. He was a cousin of the old Comte who died, and there was another man who believed he had better claim. He still makes trouble. A de Montfort, of course.’
‘When did you marry the Comte?’
‘When I was fourteen, and what a bad day that was! I cried all through the service. He never made any attempt to make a friend of me, let alone be my lover. I had Marie when I was sixteen and Philippine when I was seventeen, and then I refused to have him in my bed any more. If he came to my bed, I threw up. That stopped him. Soon after, he was wounded. That stopped him even more. And then he discovered drinking.’
‘You are a woman of spirit, Juliana,’ I said.
A spirited woman with a spirited name, and a king’s daughter, too. What a lucky boy I was that day! There was just one little cloud: I had the feeling you sometimes get when you are being watched by someone who doesn’t want you to know they are watching. Strange, wasn’t it? I put it down to guilt, there was no one in the room, I was sure of it, and anyone foolish enough to disobey the instructions of the Comtesse would have had to have had a very considerable, even suicidal, quotient of rashness. In spite of all her charms, she was a formidable young woman whom you would never want to cross. I put it down to conscience in the end. Nevertheless, the thought of being watched made me uneasy. I mentioned it to Juliana, but she dismissed it as newcomer’s nerves. Had she done this before? I must admit the notion scampered across my mind like a small rodent before I sent it scurrying back to its hole. I could not help feeling that we were taking an appalling risk making love in a room which was – at least in theory – open to the cooks for access to the spices, but I didn’t want to make too much of it because it seemed weak and fearful. You don’t want to look weak and fearful in the eyes of the beloved. The new chansons of the troubadours which the ladies so dote upon are full of the virtues of strength and bravery, but I cannot deny that the thought of the punishment that could be meted out to the trustless knave who ravished the lady of the castle – especially when she was a king’s daughter – made my scrotum curl.
‘Come,’ she told me and my brave face, ‘I have kept you too long. When you meet my husband you will understand. Now we must wash and dress and meet the girls. They tell me they have met you already.’
The daughters were playing in their room just on the other side of the castle. They had arranged a series of jumps around the room and they were playing ponies. I will always remember that moment when Juliana opened the door just a fraction so we could see through, and there Philippine and Marie were playing, full of life and innocence and hopefulness, while the old nurse dozed in a great chair in the corner.
‘Come on, Pippi, your turn…’
And then they saw their mother.
‘Maman!’
They ran towards her and hugged her. My heart went out to them. They looked so happy together, a little circle of warmth in this bleak place surrounded by dark waters. Juliana turned towards me.
‘Girls, say hello to your tutor, Master Bertold.’
‘Hello, Master Bertold,’ they chorused.
‘You’d better be nice to him or he will read you some terrible Latin curses and turn you into woodlice.’
The girls giggled.
‘I would too,’ I said. ‘Or centipedes. Which would you prefer?’
The girls thought about it for a bit.
‘A woodlouse, I think,’ said Philippine. ‘’Cos I could curl into a ball.’
‘You had better be good, and then you won’t have to decide,’ said Juliana. ‘Lessons can start tomorrow. Master Bertold is going to teach you some songs as well, and polite conversation, and storytelling. It is all going to be wonderful. Come along now, Master Bertold, and we will find somewhere for you to sleep.’
The girls held their faces up for their mother to kiss them, and I gave each of them a kiss as well. They seemed to expect it.
‘I can see you’re going to get along very well,’ said Juliana as we left.
She found me a little room upstairs just over the girls’ room, more of an extended cupboard, which had been used as a storeroom and had subsequently been abandoned. It was just about big enough for a bed and a chair. Juliana accompanied me as I collected my belongings from my temporary quarters and stowed them inside. As we passed among the twittering women and through the solar on the way downstairs, I noticed the pale, dark-haired girl with big grey eyes. She gave me a look, holding my eyes for a moment, which I could not at that time interpret. It was not unfriendly; more speculative.
‘Come along,’ said Juliana. ‘You are going to meet the person I hate most in the world.’
‘Who is that?’ I asked, surprised.
‘My husband. And watch out for the steward who sits by him, not to mention the Chaplain if he is there.’
And so began the strangest, happiest days of my life.
XI
Juliana was a beautiful woman in the full bloom of that lovely thing called young womanhood. Her head came up to my shoulder, which has always seemed to me a comfortable height for a woman. Her hair was not red like some of our Norman girls, as I say, but combined that redness with blondeness to provide a quality that almost beggared the word ‘hair’. It was not hair but a rich golden commodity spun out of grace and truth with a seasoning of joy and a pinch of desire.
But I run ahead of myself. I just mean to say that, callow though I was and priding myself on having been taken up by a Comtesse and anticipating all manner of worldly advantages, I fell in love with her. Her skin had that colour upon it and smoothness about it that tells you the person who lives inside it is healthy and blessed by God with a sound constitution. There was nothing but delight and enticement about that thing which Horace denigrates when he says ‘Ut turpitur atrum desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne’, and yet, say what he will, he seems to love it.
Her complexion was white and it was also pink, like one of those peaches that, once bitten into, gives you both colours at once, the white blushing into the red. The woman who wears these colours on her face is going to have soft, firm lips, a tongue like Cupid’s own quivering dart, and a mouth that tastes of roses and Falernian wine. (I have never actually tasted Falernian wine but Ovid speaks highly of it, or Brother Paul did, and that’s good enough for me. It doesn’t go down your throat like a liquid fretsaw and make you fart.)
Her nose was straigh
t, her eyes a very light green like a chrysoprase: piercingly and strangely bright, as if they were able to see things beyond normal capability. Just to look at her made me feel I must pay court to her and at the same time it made me realise my essential unworthiness. Well, I knew anyway that I was not good enough. I was a comte’s bastard and she was a king’s daughter. I had been brought up by a cellarer and she had been raised at court. I was a smelly male nobody and she was a fragrant princess.
But I must not write myself off, as my mother used to say. Women are strange feeders, and I am only giving you first impressions. It was the character of the woman herself that finally bowled me over. It is quite something to be a king’s daughter, a grand-daughter of William the Conqueror. There is a quality that makes you hold your head up; she inherited that from her father. The monks of Abingdon – where her mother came from – had taught her to read and write at her father’s insistence, exceptional in a woman, so she was a Beauclerc too, indeed a belle clerk. From her mother – who had been a great beauty – she had inherited a ready smile, a sense of the absurd, and a quick and affectionate nature. This could have made her vulnerable, but there was always her father’s Beauclerc practicality – you could say ruthlessness – like a keel underneath it, rarely showing, but holding the lovely ship together and on course. That ruthless side was one you didn’t want to see too much of; it was alarming, but the alarm was part of the attraction. This lovely, graceful, intelligent girl could turn into a dragon if she was wronged – or if her children were at risk – and that of course was the other thing about her. Once women are mothers, something about them changes completely. There is the steeliness of the lioness always there.
Who, I thought, would wish to wrong her? Why would anyone want to play discords on such a lovely instrument?
The answer was of course her husband, Eustace. It had not been a happy marriage. In fact, you could not think of a worse husband for her. It was bad luck on him too. For a start, she was an educated person; he was not. She was intelligent; he was not so much stupid as endlessly mistaken. She was peace-loving; all he seemed to want to do was fight. She loved a calm, well-ordered life; he loved to drink and carouse. She was confident; Eustace at bottom nursed a kind of corrosive dissatisfaction. He felt ill-used.
It was true that he was a bastard like me, but he was, as I say, descended from one of the great lords of Normandy, the Comtes de Breteuil, if from the backstairs of that noble house. There were other claimants, including the difficult and resentful Amaury de Montfort who you will meet later, but Duke Henry had decided that Eustace should inherit – on condition that he married his daughter Juliana. Good for him, you might think.
Juliana had been furious but Henry had explained with his customary steely firmness that unless she did, she could expect no further help from him; indeed the only thing for her to do would be to go and live in a nunnery. She was plainly not nunnery material, so there it was. The idea of Breteuil was good. It was one of the premier lordships of Normandy. She would be a great lady. There was only one snag. The man himself.
I was to get to know him well in the next few months. Large, shambling, older than Juliana by twelve years and already middle-aged, Eustace could still have won her affection if not her love, but he was, as I say, an unhappy man.
He hated the fact that he had had to marry Juliana in order to become the Comte. He could not forgive her for that. It undermined his position, so he decided to thwart her whenever the opportunity arose. What he had not bargained for was the grief that this would give him. She was better at thwarting than he was, and in much more subtle ways. She slept with him, with some disgust, and produced two daughters. That was enough, she said, and refused to sleep with him again. Naturally his great ambition was to re-found the Breteuil dynasty, and for that he needed a male heir, which was not to be forthcoming. He lived in a state of frustration and impotence; no wonder he liked a drink, he said, married to such a woman. Why could not the Duke have presented him with a nice, pliable Norman girl like that Angeline de Montgomerie who had once given him a handkerchief? She would have played with her maids while he played with his soldiers; she would have meekly done his bidding as they investigated in the baronial bed the possibilities of founding a dynasty – but then he would not have been Comte de Breteuil, but a sad nobody like this Latiner his wife had got in to teach the children. It was an impasse from which the only escape was wine.
The Comte de Breteuil was indeed descended from the famous FitzOsbern, Steward to William of England, the first English earl created by the Conqueror after his victory at Hastings – he told me so several times. Yes, the doltish, arrogant sot I met that day in hall, was the great-grandson (albeit by the back stairs) of the very great Earl of Hereford, a lion among men.
To look at, the Comte might not originally have been an unworthy example of a man of good lineage. He was tall with a mass of red hair, which was greying now, and a great red beard. He might once have been impressive, but the hair was now lank, the face reddened from too much sun and wine, the eyes reddened (there was a stupidly cunning, furtive look in them), the cheeks puffy, the stomach corpulent and too big for the thin legs, the beard besmirched and at mealtimes crumby – the overall impression was of a great sunflower gone to seed.
This man, Eustace, was a disgrace to the whole idea of nobility. Indeed, if I may say so – and it is not original – he was more cont than Comte. You may think me biased, of course, because I was in love with his wife, but it would be hard to find a man more undeserving of a beautiful and generous lady than he. Though you scoured the castles of Normandy and of England too, and carefully combed through the canon of bad, weak, stupid, drunken, oafish, ponderous, vainglorious, self-satisfied, short-sighted, brutal, loud-mouthed, bullying, mercenary, mouth-maggoty barons, you would be hard put to come up with a candidate who even came close. You may consider my view to have been partial, but we can still admit that Eustace was not a clever nor a likeable man. He was not a successful strategist, nor a clever tactician. He was impulsive and short-sighted, but his greatest mistake was not to cherish his wife. He found her threatening in some way which he would never admit. So there you have it. I have gone on about him enough. Now you will meet the man.
XII
The Comte was sitting at table in the hall, waiting for dinner, when we came down, the inevitable mug of wine at his hand, with a pasty, devious-looking fellow with lank, mouldy straw-coloured hair beside him talking in his ear, and a cluster of favoured knights around him; sorry-looking thugs, I thought.
The Comte was apparently dealing with some local dispute, for the first thing I heard him say was:
‘Well, there’s only one thing to do. Throw him in the moat and see if he floats.’
There was a burst of laughter around him.
‘Ah, there’s my wife with her Latiner,’ he said, contemptuously.
‘He is not my Latiner, Eustace. He is our daughters’. It is time they learned,’ said Juliana.
‘You want a Latiner, my dear, you have a Latiner. So long as you don’t want me to learn amo amas amat and all that cant. It doesn’t get you very far when you’re charging a line of enemy infantry without covering fire from the archers.’
‘No,’ said his wife, evenly. ‘I don’t think we will ever expect those words to cross your lips.’
He completely failed to catch the irony, and now he addressed himself to me.
‘Well, Latiner, I hear you are the bastard of that old whore-chaser up at Mortagne.’
He was being deliberately offensive with a side-swipe at my mother. I thought it better to meet this head-on. I had not had eight years at one of Normandy’s biggest abbeys for nothing. It is surprising what bullies and intemperate teases God-people can be.
‘My mother is dead and she was not a whore,’ I told him. ‘And chivalry, I am sure, is not dead at the castle of Breteuil.’
Juliana shot me a warning glance. It said: don’t get him completely riled if you want us to have an
easy time. The Comte obviously felt that he had gone too far for the moment. The steward whispered in his ear again, and then spoke to me.
‘I hear you wrestle well,’ he said. ‘That is unusual for Latiners.’
‘I have not had the honour of an introduction,’ I told him.
‘You don’t need an introduction. You just need to know who he is,’ said the Comte, brusquely.
‘The name is Odo, I am the steward of Breteuil,’ said the man, pouring wine into the Comte’s beaker. ‘So where did you learn to wrestle?’
‘I learnt a few tricks from the monks when I was at the Abbey of Saint-Sulpice,’ I told him.
‘I bet you did – escaping from those old bugger monks,’ said the Comte.
His sycophants erupted with laughter which seemed to mollify him. He stared at me with his piggy little eyes.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Breteuil. You may sit in hall below the knights and squires, but above the pages.’
‘Don’t you think …’Juliana began, obviously concerned at this lowly ranking for her appointee.
‘You’re right,’ he told her, ‘it is too high. He should be below the pages but above the messengers.’
There was much guffawing among the squires and pages – especially, I noticed, from Fulk – although I was glad to see there were one or two knights whose faces expressed shame at their lord’s default on politeness. Some of the new poems and books of chivalry had started to circulate at Mortagne, and had no doubt also reached Breteuil.
The Comte made a sign, indicating that he was now ready, and a sly, obsequious-looking chaplain with a face like a pale raisin said grace.
I took my place beside the youngest of the pages. The first course with several removes appeared – a watery broth, a sallet and some fish not in its first flush of freshness. We sipped and supped and fiddled with the fish, and waited for the next course during which time – it was rather long – I had an opportunity to look at my fellow diners. I noted that the ill manners of the head had reached most parts of the body. At length, the next course was brought on: some sticky gammon, a tough old capon or two and some fatty mutton. The best thing about it was the stale bread we were each given as a trencher. My companions belched, they farted, the dogs pissed under the table, and my next-door neighbour – a verdurer – who was my partner in the bowl of carrots, had such dirty fingernails that I swear I ate more dirt than food when he had dipped his hand in. The wine was thin and bleak. My other neighbour, the lowest page, a friendly-looking downtrodden youth of some fifteen years, pointed to the steward and told me he was responsible for turning out such a pig’s dinner. The weasel-faced rascal kept himself busy pouring wine from a private flagon which he shared with the Comte, and whispering in the man’s ear.
The White Ship Page 7
