‘Come along, Comte Eustace, your suggestion. What do you offer when you are besieging a castle and both sides want to end the siege, but you don’t quite trust each other?’
A beam of inspiration unfolded like a beautiful dawn across the ill-ploughed furrows of Eustace’s face.
‘You’d exchange hostages, of course.’
‘Try the crustarde, Father. We made it especially for you,’ said Juliana.
I could tell she didn’t like the direction this was going. The Duke shook his head.
‘I wouldn’t mind some more of those lampreys, though,’ he murmured.
‘Bring back the lampreys!’ shouted the steward.
The shouts could be heard going all the way back to the kitchen. There was a moment’s silence in the hall as we listened to the echo.
‘Lampreys…’
‘Lampreys…’
‘So who do you think the hostage should be?’ mused the Duke.
There was a deathly silence. No one likes to be a hostage. The lampreys came back. The Duke helped himself. Finally, he spoke again.
‘I think, Ralph,’ he said, addressing his loyal castellan, ‘I think that your son Roger could fill that part. He is a presentable and clever boy. He seems to like it here. My daughter and the Latiner will see that he is well looked after. He might even learn some Latin. Just for a very few weeks while we review the situation. Then he can be with you for the summer.’
The Castellan did not look happy. He loved his son in his soldierly way, but the Duke was his liege lord and he trusted him.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘though I do it with a heavy heart. I know that my wife would have had something to say about the deal – and of course I must explain it to the lad. But I also need surety. What can I have?’
I think Juliana knew at that moment what was going to be said and even what was finally going to happen.
‘No,’ she cried. ‘No, no, no. It shall not be.’
The Duke looked saddened, upset, cross, sorry and all those things that rulers must feel when they are impotent, even though he was the master-builder of the situation. Eustace looked indifferent – he had wanted a son anyway.
‘I want the Comte’s two daughters as my hostages,’ said Ralph. ‘I know that he will look after my son, because I will have the girls as surety. We will look after them as if they were our own. My wife always wanted a girl though I never could understand why, saving your Comtesse’s grace.’
Everyone looked at the Duke to see what he would say. He sat awhile in thought, as if suddenly alone. Then he stirred himself.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They are my grandchildren and Ivry is too near the border with France. I am not having them taken hostage by the French king. I shall look after them in my castle at Caen where they will be well cared for. You, Mr Latiner, will remain here and entertain our young guest. If anything, Ralph, should happen to your son – which is scarcely likely in the circumstances – but, as I say, if anything should happen to him, I will send the girls direct to you upon my honour and my oath to be treated as the situation demands.’
The Castellan was clearly unhappy, but he could scarcely go against the honour and oath of his liege lord. I too was unhappy at the prospect of losing my little charges. The only person to seem pleased was Eustace himself who, against the earlier odds, appeared to have come out on top. Any fool could have seen that the future was full of traps and it only needed one of them to be sprung for the Duke’s design to start whirring and revolving like the Arab water-clocks that Brother Paul used to speak of. We were all like little figures, bobbing and rotating in a predestined way at the mercy of the Beauclerc. What the end of the game would be, I had no premonition, but I would have been surprised if the Duke had a triumph for the Comte de Breteuil in mind.
XXXIII
Marie and Pippi wept bitterly when they awoke and heard the news. They loved their home and their mother, and they were experiencing for the first time that nasty feeling that gathers in the pit of the stomach at the end of something nice and the start of something unknown and quite possibly unpleasant, which assails the young when the grown-ups dictate the course of their future. My heart bled for them.
Their mother did her best to comfort them, and I did my best to comfort her. She wept and raged like a trapped tigress in the little wardrobe room behind the bedchamber.
‘I will never forgive my father for doing this – nor Eustace either. He blunders into these things because he is such a fool, and he does not realise how dangerous these games are. Anything could go wrong. He gets so drunk, he does not know what he’s doing or saying. And then anything can happen. He is a catastrophe on legs, that is why he is so dangerous. He will bring us all down.’
‘I am sure he would not want to do something that might endanger his children.’
‘He does not know what he wants or what he does. It was an evil day that my father betrothed me to him.’
She would not be comforted, like Rachel weeping for her children, she said, but I told her that Rachel’s children were dead; hers were very much alive. Poor Juliana! She had, she said, a feeling of impending disaster.
I busied myself as best I could, packing up little games and toys for the girls and helping them get their clothes together with the nurse who was to stay and help look after Roger. He was shortly to say goodbye to his father which must have been a distressing prospect for him, stern fellow that Harenc was notwithstanding.
After breakfast, Juliana confronted her father. I was not present at the interview but I understood that it became heated, indeed over-heated, and after the interview was ended and the couple emerged, we were treated to the spectacle of one of the Duke’s famous rages.
‘Don’t bring that bitch-daughter near me again, Breteuil,’ he snarled at Eustace. ‘By the death of our Lord, I cannot be answerable if you do. I expect my barons to have control of their women. She is a liability, Breteuil. Chasten her or I will do it for you.’
Eustace would have been only too glad to do a bit of chastening, and even moved forward, but at that point Juliana whipped out a knife from under her shift and held it to his throat, and she seemed to include her father in her threat.
‘Touch me and you die,’ she said.
And she meant it. The Duke was impressed and his anger subsided. I was incredibly proud of her. Such a slender young woman, she was, with all that passion inside her.
‘See what I mean,’ he said, almost laughing. ‘My daughter! Would you believe it?’
We were all impressed – the little girls and Ralph Harenc too – and it did take something off the mood of sorrow. It was almost an anti-climax when they all mounted up and moved off, the Duke first, with Ralph Harenc trotting up to ride beside him. Alice had offered to go with the girls and they had gladly accepted. I had lent her my little palfrey Blackberry who I now saw happily trotting beside Marie and Pippi on little steeds of their own. The Duke and Ralph were bound for the castle at Ivry, where they would be near to Paris and the forces of King Louis (which was of course why Henry valued it so much – a useful place and strong in defence). Six of his chosen men at arms would branch off after a mile or so, taking a different road westwards to escort the girls and Alice to Caen. The Castellan, Ralph, hardly glanced at his son as he rode away, whether out of sorrow or a soldier’s discipline I could not say. His son remained with us. He did not weep because he was training to be a page, but I could tell his heart was heavy.
We waved and waved until the last horse was out of sight where the road turned into the avenue beyond the water meadows. Eustace turned blusteringly to Juliana.
‘Ever heard of a wife’s duty to her husband?’ he blustered. ‘Your father could see very well what a termagant you have grown up to be. Threaten me with a knife, would you? I’ll have a whip on you soon enough. What sort of women do they make in England? She-wolves and mongrel bitches, I’ll warrant.’
And so it went on. I took little Roger up to the nursery and talked to him abou
t Latin and mathematics, but what he really wanted to do was go out with a little boy’s bow we had found, and shoot it at a target, so that is what we did for much of the morning, and later we found him a pony, and he trotted and cantered round and round the bailey until it was dinner time.
As it turned out, he would not see his father again.
XXXIV
While Eustace drank himself stupid – no, what am I saying, his stupidity was already far advanced when sober – while Eustace drank himself insensible among his knights in the hall below, the Comtesse and I made love that evening in the little wardrobe room that had become a kind of second home to us. We indulged in make-believe that we were living in a cottage in the middle of a forest and indeed it seemed like that – a world of wildness, wickedness and the clang of steel outside, people on the move, soldiers, beggars, people dispossessed, madmen, witches and devils.
I was beginning to like the boy Roger. He was a brave little chap, only eight years old and never been away from home before; missing his mother, no doubt, but putting a brave face on it. He was sleeping in the girls’ room, with the old nurse on a truckle bed in a tiny closet room outside. He had not been scared of the dark before, but this particular night he apparently woke shouting, frightened half out of his wits by a dream he’d had. This woke the nurse and she tried to comfort him, but it seemed to no avail. By this time we were awake, and I had time to slip on some clothes and come down to the bedroom.
‘Now, now,’ I said, ‘what is the matter here? I thought it was a nest of owls hooting in the night.’
‘The boy had a dream,’ the old nurse told me.
He hardly seemed to be awake yet, and was staring ahead as if he had seen a ghost.
‘Come, Roger,’ I said, gently, ‘what is the matter?’
‘I couldn’t see what it was my mother was telling me,’ he said. ‘There was something important she wanted to tell me, something bad that was coming in the dark, that I could not see. But it was coming. I knew it was. I had to get away.’
I realised that the boy had not seen a ghost. What was upsetting him was that, in his dream, he couldn’t see whatever it was his mother was warning him about. That was the reason for the fixed stare and the haunted expression.
‘Come,’ I said to the boy, ‘back to sleep. Very soon you’ll see your room again at Ivry, but meanwhile you have me and Nanny to look after you, and I’m sure your dear mother will be cross with me if she thought I hadn’t done a good job.’
The boy relaxed. He had a kind heart.
‘Oh, but you have,’ he said, looking first at me and then at the kindly old nurse. ‘I would never say that you hadn’t. I was frightened, that’s all. And my father says a page must never show fear, especially in the face of the enemy or before a lady.’
‘Quite right,’ I replied, as the nurse smiled at his childish earnestness, ‘but you can show fear in front of friends. That is what friends are for.’
‘Do you think so?’ said the boy.
‘Very much so,’ I said. ‘What do you think, Nanny?’
‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘You can show friends the truth. That is why we pray for them at night. It is a precious thing.’
The boy smiled. It was an enchanting smile with a touch of sadness in it, as though his life had been lonely in the castle of Ivry. We tucked the boy up and left a rush light in the room to drive away the spooks, and almost before we had left the room, he was asleep again.
Then the old nurse told me something that made me ashamed of my carelessness and manly talk. He was only a little boy.
‘The boy does not have a mother,’ she said. ‘His mother died a year ago.’
XXXV
I told Juliana about the incident next day, because I was still a little worried about the child. I used to have the most dreadful dreams as a boy when my mother was alive, about being alone in the castle in the bailey with something coming for me through the gatehouse, something looking for me and half sensing where I was. I would rush up the stairs into the hall, knowing I would be safe if I could get there before the creature saw me, and reach the hall just in time, slamming the great door shut only to find the castle deserted. I would run up the stairs and search room after room, knowing that the creature had got in and was following me up to the very top. At this point I usually woke up to find my mother’s arms around me and her soft hair in my face which almost made up for the horror of the dream. I knew what bad dreams were like.
Juliana too was upset when I told her about the boy’s mother, and I knew she was thinking of her girls and whether they would be having dreams like that with no one to comfort them in the night.
‘At least they will have each other,’ I told her. ‘And Alice, she will be there.’
She clasped my hand and I could see that she kept back the tears with difficulty.
‘I should not have spoken harshly to Alice,’ she said.
XXXVI
I felt now, as I watched the peasants bringing in logs from the forest in the rain, and the hours went from dark to grey to dark once more, that my position at the castle was becoming awkward if not impossible. Juliana was often cross and would hardly smile at me if her husband was around, which was too often the case, so there was little consolation in that direction. Without the two little girls to teach, I was beginning to seem to myself, and maybe to others, like one of those men that ladies keep in the manner of pet dogs – walkies, talkies, jokies, fuckies. Not that many ladies get fucked by their dogs, but I have heard it happens in Paris. I felt that I could hear odd remarks, little sniggers, as I ate at hall or walked around the castle.
I didn’t have quite the same enthusiasm for tutoring the boy as I’d had for my former charges. He was a nice little chap, but since he would only be staying for a short while it was not worth starting to teach him Latin, better to keep him exercised and happy with the horses he loved. He had struck up a friendship with one of the grooms and that seemed to take care of it.
To combat my feelings of uselessness and unmanliness, I had taken Juliana up on the subject of the castle’s accounts. She had complained to me that money poured out of the place as if someone was employed to stand on the roof and flick gold pieces down the gutters non-stop. She was convinced that she and the Comte were being cheated on a big scale, and she suspected the sly-faced steward, Odo, was the chief culprit. He certainly seemed to consider it his job to keep Eustace more or less permanently pissed, so the Comte himself was incapable of supervision. Odo had worked well enough for us at Christmas, after being kicked very hard up the arse, but now Eustace was back, he seemed to have reverted to his old ways.
I suggested to Juliana that I try my skill with Brother Paul’s numerals to bring the castle accounts into some sort of order. Naturally, this was resisted by the steward and his staff, but Juliana and I were not to be rebuffed. I was able to teach Juliana the new symbols, and show her how much simpler it was using them to keep an eye on what came in and what went out. As we worked it grew clearer to us daily that someone was indeed robbing the castle and its estate on a substantial and well-organised basis. It was beginning to seem as though it was not just one person in on the act, but a group of them; perhaps the whole naughty retinue. But there had to be one mastermind.
Juliana concentrated admirably on the Arabic numerals, poring over the slates, checking the inventories, and interviewing those who made the orders for provisions: the cook, the pantler, the butler, the cellarman and, over all, the steward. He only attended our temporary office in the butler’s room under duress, and sulking.
‘How do you order meat, Odo?’
‘I order what we need.’
‘And how do you reckon what we need?’
‘By what we needed in the past.’
‘There seems to be too much waste.’
‘No one has complained.’
‘We are complaining now.’
‘The Comte does not complain.’
‘Last week you ordered ten barrels o
f Burgundy.’
‘Did I?’
‘Come, Odo, we shall find the truth anyway. And if we find you have concealed something, it will be the worse for you,’ Juliana told him.
‘The Comte does not complain.’
‘The Comtesse does. Yesterday you ordered ten more barrels. Even the Comte cannot drink that much. Where did they go?’
We had a pretty good idea that the fellow was selling them on to a sleazy inn in the town. The butler, who had a sick wife and depended for his position on the steward, had broken ranks and told us of the latest delivery of Burgundy
‘The Comte has a prodigious appetite,’ said Odo with an impertinent look. ‘And the Comtesse too, I think.’
The innuendo was unmistakable. I sprang up and was about to slap him into the next village, but Juliana put out a restraining hand.
‘Leave him alone,’ she told me. ‘Let him work himself deeper into his own midden. It does not make him happy. Nor does it tell us how those two barrels reached the inn at Évreux when they should have been in our cellars.’
The steward blinked – I swear it was a confession of guilt – and glared at us both.
Juliana told me afterwards that her accusation was merely guesswork. What a creature she was! I had known she was intelligent and resourceful, but now I saw intuition and persistence too, and I admired her all the more for it. We sat huddled at a table, cheek by jowl, totting up the vast appetite of the castle, and all the while I was nourishing an appetite of my own, but our physical closeness appeared not to move Juliana at all. I might as well have been a scullion. She was intent on the job in hand, and of course I wanted to prove myself to her in this activity, but sometimes we touched accidentally, as when she put her hand out in restraint, and I burst into flame. It was agony. I burned while she froze. At least that is what I thought, though she told me later – when I taxed her – that a score of eyes were on us throughout our investigation even when we thought we were alone, and any sign of our affection would be used against us and reported. I think also that her thoughts and first care were ever with her little girls. She assured me though that there would be an opportunity for us to visit the wardrobe before long. It was a crumb, soon wolfed down.
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