The White Ship

by Nicholas Salaman

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘You keep telling me what I can and cannot do. It is tiresome, Latiner. I can do what I want. I can very easily have Alice killed. Or blinded, if you prefer, with the tip of her dear little nose cut off.’

  ‘I do not see how you can joke about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I am not joking.’

  I let that sink in.

  ‘I just want her back.’

  ‘Then you must do what I ask.’

  I thought about it. There seemed very little choice. I was impressed, as ever, by Juliana’s spirit and determination, but she was too fierce, she shone too brightly, I was being burnt against her flame. How I longed to see Alice again!

  ‘And how can I possibly explain my presence in Barfleur, or even on the ship? The Duke thinks of me as an enemy.’

  ‘I have seen to that. You saved his life, remember.’

  It was true. He could hardly execute me after that.

  ‘You will be on board to collect money owing to you and Haimo,’ she continued. ‘The Duke’s army is hungry and eats prodigiously, especially so near Christmas. When better to collect your money than on board? They can’t escape and many of them will be feeling queasy and therefore offer less resistance to a creditor.’

  ‘You seem to have thought of everything,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite. There are still bits of the puzzle to be worked on. But you are right. I have thought of nearly everything. What do you think I have been doing for the last year and a half?’

  All that show, forming up to her father barefoot in rags, as a penitent, had been a masquerade. She had probably got Eliphas to direct the performance. All that time, she had been stirring a slow pot of revenge. What a woman she was! Even while I hated her for taking Alice, I felt the power Juliana had over me. She pulled me as the moon does the sea.

  If only the action could have been on land I would have been more easily reconciled. But on water! I fell in the river once and when it closed over my head, I knew I was going to die. How small I felt in that liquid land. My breath came out like marbles. Still, you know a bastard does not sink; he swims – someone pulled me out. There was a lesson there somewhere.

  My mind was now in turmoil. There was threat, there was alarm, there was love, there was honour. That shaft of hers about a true knight – better aimed than when she fired at her father – had struck home. And she could not mean what she had said about Alice being a hostage. She would surely not play the hostage game with me of all people.

  And then I thought: there are still two months to go. Much can happen in that time. Nearer the hour, there will be opportunities to turn back, to change her mind.

  I made a decision.

  ‘I’ll go to Barfleur,’ I said. ‘If that is what I have to do, but I cannot be responsible for something whose end I do not know. You must answer to God and man on my behalf.’

  ‘Oh I will, Latiner, I will.’

  ‘And I should like Alice back at once.’

  ‘I am afraid that can’t be arranged. She is already far from here. Quite safe, I can assure you. She sends her love. Yes. I am impressed. I always thought Alice rather self-contained, quite cool indeed, but she wept when she told me to tell you she loved you. And look, now you are doing it too.’

  ‘Bastards do not weep,’ I told her, weeping. ‘She is a healer and you are a killer.’

  ‘I am quite jealous. But I am finished with all of that. It’s a nunnery for me when this story’s done.’

  ‘It will be a loss,’ I said.

  ‘All life is a loss,’ she told me. ‘We start losing the moment we are born.’

  A darkness crossed over her like the shadow of a bird. I could see now the etchings of grief on her face.

  ‘And now we must get you out of this place and back to Haimo who is expecting you with your noughts and crosses to help him cope with the Christmas rush. And I must go with the Duke my father to Gisors where he has a final conference with Cardinal Cuno, settling the issue – as if it mattered – of when Archbishop Thurstan returns to England before he himself journeys west again to Vernon, Rouen, and Barfleur, and finally to England where he looks forward to being joined by his son and court. I cannot, alas, join him this Christmas as I have been too long absent from my husband. From whom, of course, a too long absence is never enough.’

  ‘You won’t … harm her, will you?’

  ‘Who, Latiner?’

  ‘Alice, of course.’

  ‘Certainly not. But Latiner…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have eight weeks to prepare. You will not fail me, will you?’

  It was a statement not a question.

  ‘I will kill you,’ I told her, ‘if I do not have Alice back safely when I have done what you ask – whether your project succeeds or no.’

  ‘Agreed,’ she said, smiling. ‘What is love but a little death? Another glass of wine?’

  LXII

  I found Haimo in my office fiddling around with tally-sticks. He might as well have been sticking them into his hair.

  ‘I turn my back and you’re back to your old habits,’ I said.

  He rose from the table and embraced me. He had been informed of my imprisonment, but not exactly why I had fallen foul of the law. It was not considered a disgrace in Rouen, he told me, to be arrested on some religious pretext, so he hadn’t worried too much about having a partner who had tasted the Archbishop’s hospitality. What did worry him were his books: neither he nor anyone else he knew in butchery had a grip on my new system. I confess I had mainly followed Brother Paul’s advice and kept the secret close but there was one lad in the shop, one Bernard, whom I had started to instruct in my system of tallying against such a day. However, it was too soon, the lad was not ready yet, so Haimo had fallen back on his old method of accountancy and his affairs had already started to degenerate into a butcher’s muddle.

  I took him over to The Barge and bought him ale. I needed time to think.

  ‘I was expecting you earlier,’ he told me over a mug of the landlord’s best. ‘We heard that a noble person had seen to your release. Everyone likes a well-connected partner. Good for business. Who was he?’

  ‘I am not at liberty to say, alas.’

  ‘I understand.’ He touched his nose. ‘What did they get you for?’

  ‘Mistaken identity. They thought I was someone else who had been a follower of Abelard, or an Adamite.’

  ‘What’s an Adamite?’

  ‘Someone who thinks a fuck is the same as the Eucharist.’

  ‘Fuck me!’ he whistled.

  ‘That would be a Eucharist.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, I’m not surprised they banged you up if they thought you did that.’

  ‘I was shopped,’ I told him. ‘Alice too, but she’s out of prison. She has had to go home, her mother is ill.’

  ‘I am sorry for that. Who would do that, though? Denounce you both?’

  Juliana had masterminded the whole thing. It hadn’t been Luc after all. She had used him and I couldn’t blame him if she had; she was impossible to resist.

  ‘I don’t know. I thought it might have been Luc, whom we sacked, but I don’t know. You never know who’s lurking in the shadows with a knife, do you?’

  One thing at a time, I thought. I will tell him of my visit to the seaside tomorrow, though not, of course, of the purpose behind it. I was embarking now on a litany of deception, and the idea did not please me. My next duty was to go home and face Berthe, who had lost a friend as well as a workmate. I found her in her kitchen with a barrel of nutmegs which she was putting out into portions for her shop. I told her that Alice would not be coming back for a while, and of course I lied.

  ‘Her mother is ill,’ I said. ‘When we got out of prison she had to go straight home. The family steward collected her.’

  ‘Poor Alice,’ she replied. ‘She is such a lovely girl. Too good for you.’

  She smiled when she said it but I know that is w
hat she thought. I was not constant enough. I was afraid she could sense there was something I was not telling her.

  ‘Much too good for a bastard,’ I agreed.

  She looked serious. ‘You shouldn’t go on about being a bastard, you know. Half the population of Rouen are bastards.’

  ‘I know,’ I told her. ‘But, you see, I could have been a Comte if my father had been married to my mother. Bastard matters when you are brought up in a castle.’

  ‘But then you might not have been born at all,’ she said.

  In the light of my conversation with Juliana, it perhaps would have been better if I had not.

  ‘Alice will come back,’ I told her. ‘Alice is going to be all right.’

  It was easy to say, but if Juliana were to be believed something bad was going to have to happen before that promise could be fulfilled.

  ‘I might have to go away,’ I told her, ‘in a few days for some time – a couple of months. Haimo and I are thinking about setting up a shipping business.’

  She nodded. I knew she could see through me, but what could I do? We are often crueller to our friends than to our enemies.

  ‘Look after Haimo while I’m away. I don’t want him slipping back into bad habits and growing thin,’ I urged her.

  She cheered up a little at that. I knew she would find him an easier subject for her concern.

  I set to work next morning putting the accounts in order, and in a couple of days they were tidy again. I called in the lad Bernard, who knew the business and seemed to have an aptitude for the new figures. For a few more days I gave him a brisk course in accounting until I was satisfied he had the thing well in his head. In fact, the lad had quite a genius for it. I told him I might have to go away for a while and he expressed confidence in the opportunity – a confidence that I thought well-placed.

  ‘You could go far,’ I told Bernard, ‘and maybe even further than that.’

  He swore he would not let me down, and I told him I knew he would not.

  Then I went down to Haimo.

  ‘I have an idea we might learn something from the fishery trade,’ I said to him. Juliana’s idea of giving business as an excuse was obviously much better than a hypothetical brother. How well she had researched my situation! I could talk Haimo into all manner of implausibilities now he trusted me so much.

  ‘But I’d need to go down to the coast to look around. Barfleur, for instance. Would you mind if I went for a month? I have trained Bernard, who is quite as good as me, to muddle up the books while I’m away.’

  He laughed, but his brow was wrinkling.

  ‘Fishery?’ he asked. ‘It’s quite a different matter.’

  ‘Did I say fishery? I meant shipping.’

  ‘Shipping?’

  ‘Shipping feed, shipping fish, shipping cattle, shipping pigs. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To and fro. It’s just an idea, Haimo. Like my ideas about accounting. It might work. We would be rich. I need to have a look around, do some calculations, then we can talk about it.’

  He gave in because he trusted me, poor man, and indeed I had made him more money than he had ever possessed.

  ‘Don’t worry about the accounts,’ I told him. ‘Bernard is already better than me. He’s quick and he has a talent for figures. Go easy on him and he will do you – both of us – proud.’

  He looked thoughtful.

  ‘Fishery’s a dirty business,’ he told me. ‘Let me think about it. Fish doesn’t keep as well as beef or venison. And the supply is less certain…’

  ‘Not fishery, Haimo. Shipping.’

  I didn’t like to tell him not to think too hard because the project wasn’t going to happen, but I mumbled something reassuring.

  LXIII

  Taking a sackful of clothes and necessaries, I picked up the palfrey Blackberry from the stables where I kept her, mounted up, and made for the west, wishing I had my darling Alice behind me again. I was aiming for the little town of Pont L’Éveque. It was a long ride, and I could have stopped earlier at Pont-Audemer, but there was an abbey there I had been told about where you could find a good supper which included a special cheese they made, and a decent bed for the night. I like a good abbey. It reminds me of simpler times in my life. And the cheese was excellent: soft and creamy and not too sticky.

  There is a virtue in excellence in whatever form it comes. I know what you are thinking: my separation and predicament had not taken away my appetite. But to that I would answer: to face untold challenges, one has to keep one’s strength up, and you don’t want a diminished hero, do you?

  Next day, I rode on to Caen, not as big a town as Rouen, but, I thought, more handsome: plenty of those honey-grey buildings, especially the castle, a huge affair built by the Duke’s father William. I found lodging at The Turk’s Head and a kiss from the landlord’s daughter which made him bristle, but there you are, you have to take it with good grace when it is politely offered.

  Onward to Bayeux and then, following the river Aure, to Carentan where it rained and I stayed in a fleapit doss-house and spent a miserable night scratching; and then finally through Carentan which has five roads leading out of it. I took the muddy one to Barfleur. A long road it is, and by the time we reached Barfleur, Blackberry and I were weary. You come over the long, slow, gently undulating Normandy terrain to Sainte-Mère-Église and on to a funny little place called Quettehou. Now if that is not a Breton name I do not know what is; the prosecutor back in Rouen made a snide remark about Alice’s homeland, and he was right about the Bretons, but not about sweet Alice, a bastard’s curse on him. Here you glimpse at last the ocean. Before you actually come to the water, though, there is an uneasy flatness to traverse. Poor Blackberry hated it. The terrain, even the road, is full of rocks interposed with coarse grass which occasional sheep nibble with disfavour, in the manner of dowagers taking rhubarb pills.

  When the land can hold up no further, it sinks, as though exhausted with the effort of being dry, into beaches, but the rocks persist, washed by a chilly tide, sitting in the sand like prunes in custard.

  Alice had told me a little about Barfleur though on the whole she had not been happy there. Her father had died and her mother had married again, a man whom she had not liked – another drunkard. It had not been a joyful house. At any rate, since this was to be the town from which I was to launch my desperate venture, I decided to make up my own mind about it.

  I found it a low place at first.

  I do not mean its morals or its women – which are after all often the same thing – because where would men be if women didn’t have morals? I mean Barfleur’s physical setting, its appearance, the way it presents itself to the newcomer’s gaze, is low – low like the fields that surround it; low, as if it were sitting at the foot of cliffs which for some reason had been removed.

  Duke Henry would have seen it many times, since it was his main port of departure for England. I wondered what he made of it, if he made anything at all, or if he just passed through.

  In Barfleur, you keep going back to the sea. The sea is what it is all about. Sea in its incarnate form of fish is the underlying presentation to the nose with all manner of gradations building on top of it: fish near the fish dock, where the great flapping turbots and halibuts are passed out of the boats to hands on shore and then laid out on slabs for the trade, where the fish-smell gathers strength; the aroma migrates to the kitchen where the cook fillets and carves, mashes and pulps, roasts and simmers and the smokery exhales; and thence it graduates to the dining room and finally to the piss-house where it all flows back to the sea. Each time, at every stage, leaving a little bit of itself to cling and dry, adding to the fragrance of Barfleur that gently attaches itself like burdock to your clothes as you pass through the town. There is the smell of wood too, of course, out here near the boats, and the pitch and paint which keeps out the water. And nearer the edge of town, grass and rock and small, salty, seaside cows, which have a smell of t
heir own. There is also the seashore smell: half land half sea; part man, part fish; sand and water and foam, dead starfish and sandhoppers, and the occasional dead bird teeming with life. And then there is the smell of sea rain…

  The smell of a place is how you remember it. If you bottled the smell of Barfleur and held it under my nose a hundred miles from the place, I would be back there on the instant and tell you what was going on at the jetty and in the town. I would sit with you in the tavern and we would drink wine and talk about the power of the nose and the smell of the sea.

  There are low headlands around Barfleur, which poke granite fingers brusquely into the ocean. Further out to sea there are more rocks. Sometimes there are boats on the horizon, avoiding the rocks. Sometimes the ships even come into Barfleur – trading hulks and cogs and carracks and even warships – where a big jetty of honey-grey stone protects the harbour from the worst of the north wind, and all manner of shacks and store-houses fringe the seafront. There is a semi-permanent population of fishing boats: some bigger, with sails, for venturing out beyond the bay into the treacherous waters of the British sea; some sturdy little rowing boats for tending to the lobster pots and crabberies at the tip of the headland.

  The town itself is not large, maybe six hundred souls, though it swells to twice its normal size and more when the soldiers come through. Then its habitual ebb and flow is disturbed by hoarse commands and rough requirements for food and drink, and beds, beds, beds for the night. Kitchens spring up and the landlord of The Seabass (named after the town’s crest) sets out trestle tables and benches for the soldiery, and the girls wash their hair and put on their dresses. Ale flows, fiddlers play and fights break out. The church of St Nicholas sometimes has to serve as a dormitory for large contingents, this the priest enjoys, for he can make a charge and claim from the general or lord in command, and energetically does so.

  The lords and officers eat with the mayor or the squire, or take over one of the other Barfleur inns – The Jolly Sailor or The Lobster Pot – and use it as their mess. Some of the quartermasters even commandeer space from the boatyard if the weather is bad. Otherwise, the men under their captains, sergeants and lancepesades have to live under canvas.