These roads were old, connecting ancient strongholds, now great castles, over ways trodden by travellers from the beginning of history, my mentor Saul had told me. The Romans had passed this way, the Gauls before them, and earlier still the giants who placed the great stones in the earth. Our way took us through open country, fields where peasants scratched an existence between serving their lord (who was Eustace around here) and eking out the short and grubby interval between birth and the grave. Yes, I was gloomy all right, and part of that gloom of course was the knowledge that nothing between Juliana and myself would ever be the same again.
Our companions talked in low voices, perhaps because they did not want us to hear what they were saying, or maybe in deference to the occasion. I gathered there was no love lost between the men of Breteuil and those of Ivry, some ancient quarrel which the insult to the two little girls did nothing to allay. I began to feel again that there would be trouble when we arrived, and questioned the Marshal about it.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was thinking the same myself, even if the Duke is there. We must take the little ladies away quickly before too many words can be said. I will tell the men that they must remain mounted and no one is to speak or gesture, whatever is said to us. We shall not give those Ivry churls the satisfaction.’
‘Are you happy that we have palfreys for the girls rather than a wagon?’
‘The wagon is not comfortable. Too many jolts and bumps. That would be worse for the little lasses than the easy action of a horse. We shall see when we take delivery of them, but I think they might prefer riding pillion with you and me than sitting alone.’
‘You may be right,’ I said, and gave him a grateful look.
I had had the same thought. The more I saw of this man the more I liked him. I was glad at least that this commission had given me the opportunity to get to know him. He had been a distant figure before, shouting at the soldiers and sorting out the pages. His office was at the marshalsea, down by the armoury, next to the parade ground, part of the world where I had not much strayed.
We came at length to Damville, a town without much to commend it: a main street, a church dedicated to Our Lady one or two richer houses made of stone, mainly peasant cottages, a forge, shops, nothing to write home about, though it did contain a large inn, where we planned to stay the night on the return journey. People looked at us warily as we rode through. It didn’t do to be too curious about soldiers these days.
The men would have liked to have stopped, but the Marshal made us ride on for a couple of miles before finally pulling up at the edge of a wood. Here we ate some bread and cheese and drank from our water-bottles before moving on again half an hour later. The Marshal was keen to reach St André before dark. He wanted us to be well-rested before the rigours of the morrow; it was a stratagem that had served him well in battle.
‘What is it like to be in battle?’ I asked him that evening, when we were at last quartered at the sign of the Stricken Hart in St André, a pretty town with prosperous houses and a big church.
The Marshal and I had been shown a room, two beds in a garret which, though bare, was fine for our purposes; at least there were only two beds. The knights and pages dossed down in the barn behind the inn. We had come down and ordered ale and a supper of rabbit stew cooked in cider which turned out to be hearty, sustaining and even excellent. We ate and drank almost without speaking. It had been a long hard ride and we were tired.
The girl brought us two more flagons of ale and the Marshal paused to savour the first draught before answering me.
‘It is like being in a butcher’s shop, only you are the butcher and the meat, and the customers don’t like you very much,’ he said at last. ‘It is a melee with knives and swords and axes from which you will be lucky to escape without some gaping wound. The unlucky die quickly. The unluckiest die long.’
‘I think I get the idea,’ I said. ‘So why do you do it?’
‘I was brought up in the business. My father was a knight. What else is there to do? I have no Latin.’
He looked at me and laughed.
‘You must think me a strange sort of fellow,’ I said.
‘My lady does not think so,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She thinks you are a good fellow – otherwise you would not be collecting her daughters tomorrow.’
‘I think she is the most extraordinary woman,’ I said.
He said nothing, but watched me shrewdly.
‘You would be a good soldier,’ he told me. ‘You are tall and strong. You would take down a good few knights before your turn came.’
‘You think your turn will come?’
‘Of course. It doesn’t do to brood on it, but every fight that passes makes it more likely.’
‘Doesn’t that depress you?’
‘Not really. The priests say that we owe God a death. That doesn’t mean I would like to be maimed. We like a nice clean death in this business.’
‘Rather like a butcher.’
‘Indeed. What you don’t want is a leg or arm off, or a wound with bits of metal in it that turns into a festering sore. Or a thrust though your guts that slowly poisons your whole body and lets you die in agony. Or an arrow stuck in your eye that you will never get out. I have had a couple of wounds but, thank Jesu, nothing serious.’
I offered him another jug of ale, but he shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we need to sleep early and wake betimes. We need to be fresh for whatever tomorrow brings.’
‘You are right, Marshal. Thank you for your company today.’
We mounted the stairs, washed in the ewer that the girl had left on a table under the window, and composed ourselves for sleep.
‘No,’ the Marshal said suddenly. ‘You should not be a soldier, but a general. You think well, Latiner. Anyone can charge and stab and slay. Not everyone is blessed with a brain to make stratagems, create ambushes, feign attacks, and encircle the enemy where he least looks for it.’
‘I will think about it,’ I said, drowsily.
‘It is a gift from God,’ he told me.
I slept badly that night. My dreams were fractured and unpleasant, the girls were calling to me from an island in the middle of a lake but the island was sinking and I could not get to them. Then I arrived at a castle that I thought was Ivry, but I was alone and there was no one there. I knocked at the gatehouse and the door swung open. I went to the hall, but it was empty. Even in my sleep I recognised this as a version of the recurrent nightmare of my childhood about the deserted house. I went up the stairs … and then I knew that someone very dangerous was following me. If I could find someone in one of the rooms, I would be safe, but I came to the top and there was no one. And then the door opened and a huge figure in a suit of armour – who I knew was Eustace, but who turned into the Duke – unnaturally agile, danced across the floor and lifted his axe to strike my head off.
I woke and dawn was breaking. The Marshal was up and splashing water on his face.
‘You’re a lively room-mate and all,’ he said. ‘Muttering and moaning, thrashing about, I thought you were going to strangle your pillow…’
‘Did I say anything?’
‘Nothing I could understand. But there was a name you kept saying…’
‘What was that?’
‘Juliana.’
‘Oh.’
‘You poor fellow. Well, you wouldn’t be the first.’
That put me in a bad mood, coming on top of my dreams. What did he mean – that Juliana had had lovers before me? The worst of it was I could not ask him. He was a good man, but I was cross with him as I dressed and followed him downstairs.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked, as I sat scowling at the gruel that the kitchen wench had served.
I had to ask him after all.
‘What did you mean when you said I wouldn’t be the first?’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t be the first to fall for a great lady,’ he laughed, and stopped. ‘Oh no. You didn’t th
ink I was referring to her ladyship?’
I nodded glumly.
‘There has been no one,’ he assured me, ‘at least as far as I know. Nothing’s secret in a castle. God knows she deserves…’
He stopped himself out of loyalty to his lord but I knew his meaning. She deserved someone to love her and not treat her like a tiresome chattel, and worse.
‘I’m sorry I was bad-tempered,’ I said.
He laughed.
‘Time we got going,’ he said, ‘though I have never been so loath to do so. I have fought in many battles, most of which I have entered with a certain misgiving – you can’t help it. If you’re not afraid you tend to get killed. But this is a different thing and I am full of dread at what we have to see and do this day.’
We saddled up in the stables and took the road for the river Eure and Ivry-le-Château. The men seemed restless, almost sullen, during the two-hour ride, and the horses seemed to have caught the mood. They started out sluggish and needed the spur. Then they became fractious. They shied at a mad old hag who burst out of a hedgerow and started prophesying at us. At least I supposed it was prophecy – there was a great deal of woe in it.
I threw her a coin because any diversion was better than the feeling in the pit of my stomach. I did not have the stomach for what we were about to see. The old woman had spooked the men, who now talked of curses and witches, and I too felt sick at heart.
Yet when I saw Ivry again that morning, its pale grey turrets, towers and battlements outlined against the morning sun, it seemed the very epitome of grace. I almost wanted to cross myself. I could understand now why it had caused so much division. We drew up and gazed at it.
The Marshal told us it had been the first stone castle in Normandy, built more than a hundred and fifty years ago, now with a number of later improvements. Sited on an important crossroads near the old stone bridge over the Eure, it was a very useful place to have a castle – much prized by the King of France, according to the Marshal.
‘It’s bigger than Breteuil,’ said one of the knights. ‘No wonder they’re all squabbling over it.’
‘They say de Montfort wanted it,’ said another.
‘It’s not worth our two little ladies’ eyes,’ said the Marshal. ‘Come on. Better finish what we came here to do.’
We moved on, descended a low hill and the whole majesty of the castle presented itself to us. It was built to be overwhelming.
‘Wouldn’t like to lay siege to that,’ said one of the knights.
‘It has never been taken,’ said the Marshal.
We were just making sounds at each other.
We arrived at last at the gatehouse, dismounted, and gathered in a circle outside it. I was suddenly seized by an extraordinary paralysis. I was so appalled at the thought of what I was about to witness that I could not move; I could not speak. I looked at the Marshal for help and I am glad to say he was made of sterner stuff. He strode to the iron knocker on the vast oaken door and gave it good exercise. It seemed we were expected for the gate opened at once, and the same ill-featured man with lank, black hair and a lazy eye came out.
‘You are to stay here,’ he said. ‘By order of the Duke.’
‘What kind of hospitality is that?’ demanded one of the knights, a forward young blade called Malet. ‘No wonder Ivry has a bad smell about it.’
‘You can ask the Duke if you like. He’ll be here in a minute,’ said the fellow, sneering. ‘From what I heard, the moat at Breteuil smells bad enough to fumigate an ape house.’
Malet’s hand flew to his sword, but the Marshal stepped forward.
‘It would be good for us all, and the little girls who are the reasons we are here, if we could all conduct ourselves quietly and with patience.’
The lank-haired gatekeeper seemed to take that as an apology.
‘Wait here,’ he said again, and disappeared into the gatehouse, closing the great door after him.
‘Are they not going to even offer us refreshment?’ asked Malet.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said another of the knights, a tall fellow, good at the dangling-iron, I recalled. ‘Better no refreshment than poison from Ivry.’
There was a murmur of assent. Then the gate opened and a small boy emerged. He had a dog with him on a lead. We could all see that he had been blinded. My heart bled for the boy, he had been a harmless and likeable little chap; now he looked totally bereft, dark saucers where his eyes had been, his life blighted, his future dark.
‘Hello, Roger,’ I said to him. ‘It’s Bertold.’
I was going to say I was so sorry about what had happened to him, but I realised it was too late for apology. Such a thing would have been bad manners. One has to look for manners at times like this; they hold one together.
It was clever of the Duke to send him out first. He had it well worked out, did Beauclerc. He knew that something of our resentment and antipathy would be allayed by the spectacle of the wronged boy, before we saw the two girls.
The next to emerge was Ralph Harenc, the Castellan of Ivry. I noticed now that he had a long scar from God knew what encounter on his face. It fitted well with his slightly hooked nose and dark eyes like bradawls.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That is my son. That is the kind of hospitality we can now expect to receive at Breteuil. There is no need for me to say more. Your little ladies could have been well welcomed at Ivry, garlanded with roses. Instead we had to ask the Duke, whom we have served faithfully, to send us his grand-daughters, your hostages, to do with as we willed. It gives me no pleasure, but it is with a sense of justice performed, to deliver them to you today … My lord the Duke says that if the laws are not followed, if the barons do not see justice done, Normandy will fall. He will not allow that to happen.’
As he said this, and I was thinking again how clever it was of the Duke to put his words in the Castellan’s mouth, the door opened again and the Duke himself emerged, leading my two little pupils by the hand. I nearly collapsed. My knees went. I was in shock. My two pretty girls were almost unrecognizable, their wounds more dreadful than the boy’s.
Something in my head said: of course, the wounds are more recent.
I had a strange thought, whose origin was a mystery to me. It seemed to come from far away, another world. I suppose we all have these experiences now and then. I thought: I cannot believe I am living at a time when such things happened.
What was most shocking about the treatment of the girls was not their eyes which, God knows, was bad enough. We had seen the boy, though, and knew what blinding was like, horrible though it was on a child. It was savage and painful, but you treated it with white of egg, and it healed. Afterwards you would need help for the rest of your life. You would be unlikely to marry. You would be a burden until you died, and life would be a burden to you. You would be thrust in on yourself, and it was to be hoped that you would get on well with yourself because, if you didn’t, it was too bad. That was the way it was. Even so, the wounds were dreadful to see: recently scabbed and crusting; great oozing wells in which the tears mingled with the juices of healing, red and inflamed, where pieces of the connecting tissue had been broken and veins still tried to bleed.
The eyes were pitiful, but the noses were worse.
Each girl’s nose had had its tip sliced off.
The wounds were raw and red and trying to scab despite the flow of tears and snot from the nostrils, but the humiliation inflicted on the little girls’ was the worst part. They had been so pretty and now they had been rendered grotesque like two little pigs. Even the blind can perhaps find love and get married, but these two would surely never attract a husband. They had been condemned to shame and even ridicule as well as darkness.
‘How could anyone do that?’ I muttered to the Marshal.
He had seen everything that can happen to the human body when butchered with a sword, pierced with a lance or transfixed by an arrow, but still I could tell he was shocked.
The knights were moved –
to anger. One of them, Malet again, uttered an oath and advanced on the Castellan, drawing his sword.
‘You piece of hell-shite,’ he cried. ‘Is that all you are good for at Ivry? Maiming little girls. Let’s see how you fare against a sword.’
‘Yes,’ cried another. ‘Blinding was too good for them, was it? You had to add your own stroke of evil. Bravely done, Ivry.’
The Castellan’s eyes blazed and he too drew his sword. His own men gathered about him, raising their weapons. It seemed there would be bloodshed at any moment.
‘Put down your swords – now. All of you.’
The Duke’s voice was harsh.
‘Disobey me and I will see that you are executed. Justice has been done. You have nothing to complain about.’
‘You set this ball rolling,’ said the Castellan, aiming his words at the Marshal.
‘Yes. And you went further than you need have done. What purpose did it serve?’
‘My grand-daughters do not need to hear all this,’ said the Duke, sternly.
‘That is all very well,’ I suddenly heard myself saying, ‘but it was your hard will that brought them to this pass. You have saved yourself trouble, but you have willed it on the innocent. You have made an enemy of your daughter and appeased uncertain enemies and dubious friends. You have become a monster.’
‘Who is that man? What is your name, fellow?’
‘Bertold, sir. Bastard son of the Comte de Perche.’
‘Well, bastard son. You are going to discover what it is like to feel the wrath of a king. Take him away.’
Two men advanced on me and fastened my hands behind me.
‘You cannot do that. Your grand-daughters need me, sire.’
‘My grand-daughters need rest and food. They need to heal. They need their mother and their home. That is all the need they want. And what I do not need is truculence and turbulence and impertinence from a nobody. You are nobody, bastard. You do not even exist. You are like something seen at dawn, out of the corner of an eye, that vanishes. Take him away and forget about him.’
The White Ship Page 21
