The White Ship

by Nicholas Salaman

  The third trumpet sounded.

  The drums started beating. I had forgotten about them. It is a sound to instil both fear in the enemy and courage in the vanguard. It hits a certain nerve in the head and sets off a madness, which one needs on the battlefield. As we neared the French, the insults began to fly again, this time at close quarters, and they the same to us, and then we were upon them, raining blows with our sticks and trying to avoid their assaults. One large Frenchy came at me as I was thwacking a little eely fellow, and he caught me a blow on my helmet which made my ears ring, I turned, quick as lightning, and poked him hard in the midriff which took the breath out of him and then I kicked his knees away as he doubled up. I clouted another fellow who came at me from behind – I pretended not to see him – and then I turned, quick as a flash, and hit him squarely on the earpiece of his helmet. He sat down on his bottom as though his wits were addled. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fulk. He was fighting his way through my band of stout English warriors who were, I could see, beginning to taste victory. We were close to their standard now, but Fulk was having none of it, and was fighting like a wild man of the trees, a man possessed. He really wanted my head on his wall. I could taste blood on my mouth and the blood was hot, though I had no idea where it came from. And then he was upon me.

  ‘There you are, Fulk,’ I grunted. ‘What took you so long?’

  He didn’t wait to reply, but swung his stick low and meanly at my manhood, which I only half escaped and felt a great low sickle of shrieking pain stabbing at my centrepiece. I was not going to let that stop me, though. I swung right and then feinted right again, but I caught him left with a kick to his knee, which he half avoided but which almost brought him down. He threw away his stick and drew a knife, which was strictly against the rules.

  ‘You are a little fucker, aren’t you, Fulk?’ was all I could say before he was upon me with the blade, swinging it at me dangerously close to my stomach.

  I caught him off-balance and thumped him across the top of his back, just below the neck, the place which numbs you and breaks your grasp, and his knife flew from his hand. He bent low to the ground to find it, and I crashed my stick on his helmet, making a noise like a gong, and turning his brain to syllabub, but he had the knife again, and I dropped my stick and closed with him, and we wrestled.

  He stabbed me once, but weakly, in the chest, and then I had his arm and we fought over the weapon, twisting and turning as the struggle raged around us and the French standard was won. We rose, we fell and we dropped again. He had the strength of madness on him, and I feared that he would triumph and everything would be lost, so in desperation I used Saul’s guile again, the trick where you fall and drag the opponent with you. Fulk must have forgotten it or at any rate been unprepared. It fooled him, though some instinct told him to drop the knife as he went down. My weight knocked the wind out of him, and he lay there for a while as I struggled up, grabbing the knife as I did so in case he struck again.

  The fourth trumpet sounded, almost in my ear.

  ‘What is this?’ cried the Marshal, sternly.

  He had walked over to see that the standard was handed over correctly without any chicanery from the defenders, and had spotted the knife in my hand.

  ‘It is a knife, sir,’ I said.

  ‘I can see it’s a bloody knife. But who does it belong to?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ I replied. ‘It was on the ground and I picked it up, thinking to hand it in, sir.’

  I could see Fulk sitting up, and looking at me with an expression of surprise. I was surprised at myself, to be honest. But in the abbey I learnt the universal lesson that you don’t sneak on a colleague even if he is your worst enemy. This one wasn’t just my worst enemy, though, he was also Juliana’s and I very much doubted if she would be as lenient as I was. It was too late to retract, though.

  ‘Well, well, well, what have we here?’ wheezed Eustace, squeezing his shanks over towards us.

  ‘This man has found a knife, sir.’

  ‘Found a knife? Used it more like. Filthy coward’s tricks. Who is the man?’

  Eustace loved the prospect of a punishment.

  ‘I found the knife, sir,’ I told him.

  The Marshal intervened.

  ‘He seems to be the wounded party, sir. Look, he bleeds.’

  ‘It is a scratch, sir,’ I said.

  ‘I might have guessed it would be the Latiner. Fights like a woman, as you might expect. Who was he fighting with the knife?’

  ‘It was my fault, sir,’ said Fulk, rising to his feet. ‘The knife was on the ground. I saw him pick it up and start to take it to the Marshal. And in the heat of battle, sir, I attacked him. I don’t know why. You know how it is when the blood’s up. I must have twisted the knife around in the struggle, but I had no intention of stabbing him.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said the Marshal, ‘no harm done. A melee is a melee.’

  ‘I disagree, Marshal,’ cried Eustace, his dander well up. ‘The Latiner carried the knife, so he is the guilty party. He must be taught a lesson. I am not sure that taking a knife to a melee is not a capital offence. I will have to consult the rules.’

  ‘But he did not take the knife to the melee, sir,’ said the Marshal. ‘We have a witness who saw it on the ground. It must have been left by some townsman.’

  ‘Don’t chop logic with me, Marshal. Have the man arrested and taken to the dungeon to cool his heels. Let him amas amat down there. Then we shall see what our purposes dictate.’

  And so I was marched off by two Frenchmen back through the gatehouse, across the drawbridge under the gaze of my little pupils and their mother, and down the stairs into the dungeon where the gaoler put me in an iron cell and locked the gate. I had done what I had always been advised by Juliana not to do, put myself in Eustace’s power. Worse still, Fulk was at large to spread whatever poison he chose about Juliana and me. It was a pretty pickle, but I still felt some exhilaration at having survived an exercise which was as close to a genuine battle as one could get. Every man must wonder sometimes what it feels like to fight at close quarters. I was not at all sure that I wanted to do it again, but to have done it at all was some kind of achievement.

  It was cold in my cell, and growing colder, and the straw was none too clean. I tried to sleep and must have succeeded, tired after my exertions on the field.

  I was woken sometime later by a voice softly calling my name, and a hand waving at me through the bars. I knew immediately it was not Juliana. The hand was large and hairy, and belonged to Fulk whose face now appeared, illuminated by a single candle.

  ‘I have brought you some chicken and some bread and a flask of wine. I have been to see the Comtesse and told her it was my fault. But don’t get the idea that I like you.’

  I seized the food gratefully, and took a long draught of the wine.

  ‘Did you tell her about your secret?’ I asked. ‘The one you spoke to me about?’

  ‘I made an oath to her that I would never breathe another word of it.’

  ‘So how did you discover it?’

  ‘I made it my business to watch you. I saw you escaping on Midsummer Night. I hated you for it.’

  ‘I know that we have not been friends, Fulk.’

  ‘I hate you, Latiner. You see, I love the Lady Juliana, too, but you are luckier than I am, the son of a poor country priest. I can never be good enough for her.’

  ‘You really love her?’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised. A dog can look at the moon.’

  ‘Of course it can. And howl.’

  There was a faint hint of a smile.

  ‘She commands me to like you,’ he said.

  ‘Can you do that?’

  He paused for a while before answering.

  ‘Not easily. I will try. I will speak up about the knife being on the ground. Even to the Comte. I will maintain it. Meanwhile, she commands me to give you this key, and you will know what to do with it. I have already unloc
ked your cell here. She advises you to absent yourself for two days, by which time the Comte will have gone. Things are astir in Andely. And now I must go before I am missed. I have already been too long.’

  I held out my hand to him which he took.

  ‘I am sorry that we quarrelled, Fulk,’ I said.

  ‘You fought well,’ he told me. ‘I respect that, Latiner.’

  And then I said something that I regretted, both then and later.

  ‘You know, you should tell the Comtesse how you feel about her. It can do no harm.’

  What was I trying to achieve? Was I trying to encourage him or cheer him up? It could only be a source of embarrassment to her, and probably to him. Just occasionally you do something truly idiotic, and this was such a moment, but at the time he seemed to take it well.

  ‘Maybe I’ll do that,’ he said, in that half-truculent, half-apologetic way.

  And so he slipped away into the shadows of the dungeon while the gaoler slept. My heart had lifted. The danger had seemed imminent and my predicament uncomfortable to say the least. Now it seemed there was a way out and Fulk had played Ariadne to my Theseus.

  I took the key and the candle Fulk had left me, stole past the snoring gaoler, and unlocked the door of the tunnel that led to the lake. Half an hour later, I was at The Bear, sleeping soundly in an upper room on a moth-eaten pillow.

  XXVI

  I returned to the castle after two days, as I had been advised, to find that Eustace had left on his travels again. Like love, plotting is addictive: it takes over the mind and seems to be what all of life is about, the end is lost in the delight of the means. Eustace had forgotten about me, and the gaoler had not even been chastised for my escape.

  Juliana embraced me when we could be alone for a moment in the wardrobe, but no lovemaking, she told me, there was too much afoot, her mind was aflame. She was convinced that Eustace was going mad. Meanwhile, she had Christmas to think about, since it was almost upon us and there was much to be done.

  ‘Eustace and the steward have organised nothing,’ she said. ‘No, that is not quite right. The steward has organised a cut for himself with Master Roger the cook, who is never here, and the town butcher Gascelin, in the event of there being a Christmas feast. It is left to me to pull the feast together, and give the children, the castle, the town – and, yes, you – a Christmas to remember.’

  Traditionally the highlight of Christmas was a dinner for three hundred people. People had worked hard for a year, there had been fierce storms, floods, raids from rebel soldiery, lootings by deserters, crops destroyed, buildings burnt, and the people needed to let their hair down. This one had been an average kind of bad year, and now it was time for the castle to give back a little of what had been taken. This was the way loyalty was bred. Juliana knew this. Eustace had no conception of loyalty so could not understand that it mattered.

  Alongside the feast there would be charades, games, caroles, dancing, mummery, forfeits, boars’ heads, gifts for the servants, alms for the aged. There was frumenty to make and umble pies, swans to be caught, summonses to the feast to be sent out, and the whole solemn buffoonery of the season to be planned.

  Of course, Juliana admitted that she didn’t have to do all the work herself, but she had to oversee it and catch it before it went wrong. Last year there had been no feast, and noses had been put out of joint. This year one of the huge, brown robin pots which seethed whole carcasses was cracked owing to a careless kitchen boy not watching the cauldron. Another one would have to be bought and fetched from Verneuil. There were a hundred, no, two hundred, such considerations.

  I found her one day temporarily overwhelmed with administration – the Steward was driving her mad – and I took her out for a while, the day being exceptionally mild, to walk in the winter sunshine around the bailey. She confessed to me some of her frustrations as we walked: the poor organisation in the kitchen, the waste of resources, the complete lack of records in the cellar, all of which should have been in Eustace’s remit, at least to oversee. And then since she was on to Eustace, she told me that she had thought about killing him.

  I looked around anxiously lest we be overheard, but the bailey near us was deserted. It was for much the same reason, she said, that her father had deposed his brother Robert: neither Robert nor Eustace was any good at his job. Eustace was an incompetent castellan and a poor leader, just as he wasn’t any good as a husband – which was, she said, part of his job; and should be the best part, if he had had any sense.

  ‘I never had a girlhood,’ she said. ‘My father betrothed me to Eustace when I was ten years old. I married him four years later. I told my father what a terrible thing he had done, and he said he was sorry, but we couldn’t always do what we liked. You can imagine what Eustace was like in bed. No, please don’t. I had my lovely daughters, and that was it, for me, as I’ve told you. I never wanted to see him again. I do not see the point of him any more. He keeps coming back here like a bad smell. Why don’t I just kill him? Or … you?’

  ‘You want to kill me?’

  ‘I mean, you could kill him, stupid.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m clever enough for that,’ I said, dubiously.

  I was seeing a dark side of Juliana that I had only glimpsed before, but that was the thing about her. I kept seeing new Julianas. Twice in the last few weeks she had mentioned killing someone. First Fulk and now Eustace. It was not to say that they had not asked for it, but all the same. Many of us say to ourselves that we wish someone was dead, but to say it out loud, and mean it, that is something different. In view of what happened later, I should have taken more note of it – but at the time I felt sorry for her. To be so young and so imprisoned in a marriage that was forced on her; it was a terrible thing.

  ‘There is definitely a Roman side to you, Juliana, and it isn’t just your name,’ I told her.

  The joke covered my confusion. Eustace was appalling, but I couldn’t wish him dead. Given enough rope, I thought, the man will kill himself anyway. Juliana laughed and said no more about it. If I saw danger then, I refused to accept it. I was addicted to her, you see, as Eustace was to plotting. I didn’t like her in this mode, but I still loved her.

  We had arrived back at the drawbridge and, as we mounted the steps to the hall, she turned to me.

  ‘You will help me, won’t you, Latiner,’ she said.

  It was not a question. We parted and she went back to her planning and ordering in the Comte and Comtesse’s private rooms behind the hall. She had a meeting with the butler and steward (likely to be stormy). I returned upstairs to my pupils whom I had left with the ladies in the solar making decorations for the festivities.

  XXVII

  The twelve days of Christmas passed wonderfully, as I knew they would as soon as I saw Eustace return. He arrived back from Andely on Christmas Eve, pale, shivering, covered in snow, and starting a terrible feverish cold which laid him out for all twelve days of the celebrations.

  He could do nothing except lie in bed like a great bottled sea-cow with a headache and a nose redder than ever, groaning and calling for wine. I did not get out my medical box as I could have done, for there are medicines there that will cure everything but death, and that too in extremis, but the man did not deserve it. Nor did I advise him that the wine would simply prolong the illness, for I wanted it prolonged. I wanted it infinitely extended.

  The result was that from Midnight Mass in the castle chapel till the last crumb of the great feast of Twelfth Night, we had no Eustace. Never has a disease brought so much happiness. The castle overflowed with joy as never before and, tristabile dictu, never again. But the Twelve Days of Christmas 1118 became legendary.

  It started snowing on Christmas Eve, which showed the castle in an admirable light. On the return from Midnight Mass, we lit the Yule log, cut from a cherry tree, specially felled, which reminded us of our Norse heritage (according to the chaplain). We drank mead, and embraced each other.

  The chaplain said M
ass again at dawn, and a further Mass was held again later in the morning. It coincided with a visit from the Bishop of Evreux, forced out of his bishopric by Amaury, and staying in the town with the rector who was an old friend of his. By staying in Breteuil, a royal estate, he was under the protection of the Duke. He gave us a fine sermon. I could see he did not take to the chaplain and kept interrupting him in conversation, which of course endeared him to Juliana and me. He and the rector stayed the rest of the day with us. The Lord of Misrule held court in the afternoon, hitting us with his bladder, making suggestions to the ladies, and generally being insupportable.

  We had an exchange of presents. I gave Juliana a subtle perfume of jasmine and wallflower that Brother Paul had put in my medicine box with instructions: ‘to melt the heart of a young woman’. It did seem to have a remarkable effect.

  She gave me a silver coin of great antiquity which had been in the possession of a crucified centurion. It showed the head of the Emperor Elagabalus, a particularly nasty individual, but the coin was said to have had great powers of protection. I keep it always about my person.

  The little girls got everything a little girl could desire, including some wonderful new chalks for drawing, and some costumes for dressing-up

  Before dinner, we had a walk in the snow to the lake, and the girls threw snowballs at us, one hitting the Bishop really quite hard on the nose, but he took it well. Then there came dinner. This was not the great Christmas feast which was planned for Epiphany but was still a considerable spread with at least four courses each with several removes, goose being the traditional pièce de résistance. Everyone was there: knights, squires, pages, messengers and grooms. The bishop threw himself into games with the children, and succeeded in downing a whole quart of burgundy. There were minstrels, and a gitterner, there was dancing and a game of forfeits with embarrassing questions and exchanges of clothing. Alice lost one of her garters. How we roared! Fulk was nearly naked by the time we had finished with the forfeits. We had to put the bishop on a sledge in the end, lying like a carved effigy, and then all of us, in procession by lantern light through the snow, took him back to his quarters in town. The sexton thought someone had died. We nearly died laughing.