by Norah Lofts
Father demurred but by this time he was beginning to be interested in the mystery which seemed to lie behind this situation—as indeed I was myself—and after a little persuasion he did send the letter. The reply was prompt and blunt. It said that the duke was betrothed to Alys of France; and it added, obviously in reply to some remark in Father’s letter, that the inquiry had given no offence, since were the duke free to do so he would marry any girl who brought in her hand a good dowry to contribute to the crusade he was planning.
Over this letter Father and Berengaria fell out. Father was furious. ‘It’s the letter of a huckster and an insult to the unfortunate woman he is to marry. It implies that were he free he would sell himself to the highest bidder, as Jaime of Alva sells the services of his Arab stallion. You are well out of any further dealings with a man of so coarse a nature. This letter is typically Angevin; they’re upstarts and hucksters to a man and would sell their own mothers to serve their greeds.’ He said a great deal more, all of it derogatory, and then added, ‘Let me hear no more about it. This ends a matter that should never have been begun.’
‘Father, it practically invites you to make him a dazzling offer. And if you love me you will take it in that spirit and write back and say that if he will marry me instead you will make a good contribution to his crusade.’
Father looked at her with disgust and dismay. He smashed down his fist on the letter. ‘You mean to tell me that after this you want him? How can you be so shameless? And so stupid? With beauty like yours are you to go to a man who thinks of nothing but the bag of gold round your neck? Good God, Berengaria, you must be mad!’
He had spoken the forbidden word. And while he stood ashamed, his face contracted by the pain of his thoughts, Berengaria began to shed her beautiful tears.
Whether it was a gift from God or a mere result of old Ahbeg’s little knife, she could cry as I never saw another woman do. She never sniffed or snuffled, her face didn’t screw up or her chin pucker and shake; water just welled into her great wide eyes and spilled over her cheeks and she looked just like a rose with early-morning dew on it. Nobody could resist her then, though any woman watching her must needs be jealous of such a rare weapon. I must admit that she used it rarely, which was perhaps rather clever of her, and hardly ever on anyone except Father and Young Sancho.
However, on this occasion she had come into opposition with something which in Father was not just a formal pattern of behaviour but a deep and vital principle, his chivalry. This whole affair, in his opinion, was a subtle slight upon an innocent lady. I knew that if he had ever been in Richard’s place and had to write that letter he would have found it incumbent upon himself to add to the brief statement of his betrothal the courteous, even if untrue, comment that he loved Alys and regarded her above all women.
Father was a romantic and an idealist; that was why he had cherished his mad Beatrice; why he had let his daughters grow up unbetrothed. It was also why he tried to make up for his one most human lapse by treating me so well, making me a duchess in my own right and arranging for my financial independence.
And it is a fact that when the gentle sentimentalist really digs his heels in he can be firmer than the worldling whom worldly arguments sway.
‘I’m very sorry, Rosebud, but even to pleasure you there are some things I cannot do. And to offer to buy a man from the lady to whom he has given his troth is one of them.’
‘But I can never marry anyone else. Unless I marry him I can never be married at all.’
‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ Father said, beginning to take refuge in rage. ‘You’ve never even spoken to the man or looked him full in the face. I’m a bigger fool ever to have lifted a finger to humour such a fancy. And you won’t persuade me by crying. You’re just obstinate—obstinate as an iron mule—and I ought to take a stick to you.’
I approved of that expression, “iron mule”; precise and picturesque, it was worth remembering.
That evening Berengaria began a siege on the time-honoured method of starving one’s opponent out but it was original in that this time the besieger did the starving. She refused breakfast, dinner and supper; she said she felt sick and the thought of food nauseated her. She ate, at any time, less than anyone I ever knew and would refuse any dish over- or under-cooked or one that had caught the smoke from the fire or been too much handled in the serving. Woe betide the page who sneezed or coughed while he was handing her a dish, however choice; the food was quite discounted, the sneeze or the cough sharply reprimanded and the dish sent away untouched. I had known her, through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, to sustain life for thirty-six hours on a single crust and be none the worse. So I did not concern myself over a twenty-four-hour fast. Nor was I unduly perturbed on the second day. She must surely, I thought, come to her senses—and one of the senses was the sense of hunger. But no! The third day came. I watched, sceptically, minutely; Mathilde went in and out of the chamber where Berengaria had taken to her bed but I would swear on the Cross that no crumb was smuggled in. And by the end of the third day her face showed the pinch of hunger and had the wan, hollow look which beggars’ faces have.
Pila, Catherine, and Maria, though they made many inquiries and many suggestions, tended to keep their distance lest the illness from which their princess was suffering—as they thought—should be contagious. Only Mathilde, who would have faced the plague itself for Berengaria’s sake, and I, who knew what it was all about, would enter the inner room. And my interest, I must confess, was almost purely academic; how far would she go, I wondered, to force Father into taking action against his will? I was interested to see what starvation felt like and managed, without drawing attention to the fact, to abstain from food myself for twenty-four hours. And I did become desperately hungry; so hungry, in fact, that I went to the kitchen and broke a piece of meat off a joint of venison on the spit—it burnt my fingers and my tongue and tasted like heaven and made me most profoundly sorry for beggars.
Yet there was Berengaria refusing calves’ foot jelly flavoured with fresh oranges, turning her head away from bowls of bread and milk flavoured with a clove-stuck onion, rejecting even a glass of sweet red wine from Portugal. An iron mule indeed!
On the morning of the fourth day Mathilde came out of Berengaria’s chamber into the bower and said:
‘Whatever she says and against her orders, if need be, I’m going to tell the King. This is no ordinary sickness. I know the signs. And this is the way her mother, God rest her sweet soul, started. His Majesty wouldn’t take up arms in the cause of Castile against Aragon and my lady took it very hard and wouldn’t eat from Ash Wednesday till the Friday following. And then I took a clothes peg and forced her jaws apart and poured in the broth so that she must either swallow or choke on it. And she lived and was crazy thereafter, to my everlasting sorrow and his too. Now the same thing has happened; I know the signs. But this time I’m not taking a clothes peg. Whatever it is on the mind has got to be lifted or she’ll be like her dear mother. Now, Your Grace, would this come better from me or from you?’
In my own way I loved my father. I blamed him for my crooked back and for my illegitimacy but on the whole I enjoyed being alive, my eating and drinking, my comfortable way of life, my money, my freedom. In the circumstances he had done very well by me. And very often he amused me too.
I felt that it would be better for me to go and talk to him than that Mathilde with her morbid memories, her grudge and her grim predictions, should do so. So I went to his private apartment and told him that Berengaria hadn’t taken sup or crumb for three whole days and that it was my belief that she would not until he had written to the duke again.
The Plantagenet’s reply this time pleased Father and displeased Berengaria. It read, ‘To my dear brother and friend of Navarre, greeting. Being bound, I cannot be your son-in-law; but when you choose him take care that he be a man of your mind and mine and we will set your standard, with ours, on the walls of Jerusalem.’
&
nbsp; ‘You see,’ Father said.
And Berengaria said, ‘I see.’
It was to me that Father said, ‘But being bonded, why doesn’t he marry the wench? He’s always at war and he’s heir to England. Why doesn’t he marry and get her in whelp? By God, the whole thing is a mystery. I think I’ll concoct an errand and send Saturnino to London. He’ll sniff it out if anybody can.’
So Cardinal Saturnino had departed for the court at Westminster with orders to make himself especially agreeable. And the court at Pamplona had settled down. Something had broken in Berengaria. She was no longer the beautiful, pampered favourite to whom all things came as by right. She was the little girl who saw, at the fair, some bright and glittering toy and cried unashamedly, ‘I want that, I must have that, that is for me!’ and then learned that an earlier customer had reserved it.
And I, who had for seven years, ever since I understood our positions, envied and even hated her because she was straight and beautiful and a real, royal princess, had come in the end to pity her. Because it was so plain that nothing gave her pleasure; nothing mattered save that great redheaded, hard-hitting Plantagenet who was bonded to Alys of France.
III
It was because I pitied her that I took Blondel home with me. Emerging with that thought out of the past and into the present, I became aware that the boy had been saying something about the new way of building outer walls with projecting towers.
I said rather vaguely, ‘And where did you learn of such things?’ He said, a little shamefacedly, that he had once watched one being reconstructed.
‘One day,’ I said, ‘I am going to build a house. With a glass window.’
And why, I wondered, did I say that? I had never mentioned that intention to anyone; but I had, very often, when the other women were talking about the future and making much of their hopes and plans, clutched the thought to me, as one clutches the covers on a cold and draughty night. One day Father would die and Young Sancho would be King and then he would marry and his Queen would certainly not want me about the court. But I wouldn’t be either pitiable or self-pitying; I’d be off to my own Duchy of Apieta where, under the sheltering shadow of the great castle, I could build a house without defences, a comfortable house to live in with a glass window and a shelf for my books and an herb garden to scent the air outside the door.
And no steep stairs, I thought grimly, for we were now at the foot of the Queen’s Tower and the steep, badly worn stairs loomed before me. I knew very well that Blanco, who lived in the little kennel-like room at the top of the flight, would come at a call and carry me up as easily as though I were a kitten but such a procedure humiliated me and never, in health, did I take advantage of his services. Alone, I swarmed up on all fours like a crab; under observation I climbed slowly, clutching the wall and hating the places where it had worn smooth and slippery. Conscious of this, and not wishing to make a spectacle of myself before the boy, I signalled to him to go ahead of me. ‘Up here,’ I said, and waited.
Any other boy picked up in the market place would have obeyed me thoughtlessly; but this boy, with a little smile, stood aside, flattening himself against the turn of the wall. Where had a strolling player picked up such manners? I wondered as I set myself to face the climb.
At the third step he was just behind me and at the fourth his hand was under my elbow. I had a vision of that hand as it had lain between the ears of the bear—slim, young, browned by the sun and, I remembered, most noticeably clean. My elbow fitted into the palm of it and with each painful effort I made it was there, warm, supporting, surprisingly strong.
Was it at that moment that I fell in love with him? I do remember that, mounting the stairs, helped by his hand, I was stricken anew by the cruelty of my plight. Oh, I thought, to be ordinary, shaped like a human being, to be looked at and touched with affection, desire! Even this crumb of contact, offered from a courtesy tainted by pity, was so sweet!
As we neared the top of the stairs Blanco, the huge black eunuch looked, like a guardian dog, out of the tiny room, not much larger than a kennel, in which he spent his doglike life. He looked at me with dumb reproach because I had eluded him and gone out alone. He loved to be taken into the street as escort; it was one of the diversions of his life which was, if possible, more dull and monotonous than that of the ladies he guarded. And at that moment the sight of Blanco blended most dismally with my secret feelings. He was a man, unsexed by his fellow men; I was a woman, unsexed by God. We would both have been better dead.
‘Blanco,’ I said, ‘I have forgotten to order my new slippers. Run, will you, and say that I have decided upon red leather lined with wool. The apprentice who brought up the patterns will know which I mean.’ His great black face split like a melon with joy at the prospect of a thirty minutes’ jaunt into the sunshine. The boy and I went on into the solar.
Having since seen the interior of several castles, I realise—as I did not then—that we women of the court of Navarre lived in circumstances of almost oriental luxury. Our grandfather had brought back with him from the East not only the disease which finally killed him but a great baggage train of treasures as well as a number of notions about comfort. There were no rushes on our floors, instead a great plenty of dark, silky rugs; there were divans, soft with cushions; rich curtains shrouded the bare stone of the walls and we five women owned among us no fewer than three silver looking glasses.
The occupants of the solar were sitting exactly as I had left them: Catherine, Maria and Pila idly stitching away at a piece of tapestry. The fourth corner, mine, was held up for their convenience on a stool, so the whole picture was spread out, easily visible, and even as I moved into the room, crying in a lively way, ‘Look what I’ve brought you! A lute player who knows all the prettiest songs,’ I glanced from habit at the amount of progress they had made. They were always at work on their corners, in a very lackadaisical fashion, and it amused me to neglect mine for a week and then to sit down and work for a couple of hours in a frenzy of energy and so keep myself even with them. It was only this spirit of competition which made the stitching at all tolerable to me. Their morning’s work, I noticed with satisfaction, had done very little to advance them.
As I spoke they raised their heads and with little exclamations of excitement and satisfaction began to scramble their work together. Blondel made another of his accomplished bows and then took the sailcloth wrapping from his lute. He looked quite composed now and I saw that he had spoken truly when he said he was not nervous.
I signed to him to wait.
‘Where is the princess?’ I asked.
‘Within,’ said Pila with a casual nod towards the inner door. ‘Our chatter disturbed her; she said her head ached and she didn’t desire anyone’s company.’
‘It’s to be hoped,’ Maria added, ‘that she won’t hear the lute. The boy should play very softly.’
Catherine, who disliked me very much and between me and whom a little nagging war of attrition, waged with sharp words, went endlessly on and on, said, ‘A lute, of all things!’
The simple phrase was an accusation of tactlessness laid against me. For lack of any other reason to explain their mistress’s recent decline in spirit, the ladies of the bower had fastened upon an explanation much to their taste—which was, in general, morbid. She was heartbroken, they believed, about the death of old Coci, our late lute player. I had never seen Berengaria show any particular sign of affection for the old man nor, I think, had they; but his death had happened by a most timely chance to occur just when things began to go wrong with her. I was in a position to know that at the time when Coci died everyone in a court could have dropped dead in a moment without causing Berengaria a pang; however, I subscribed to the legend because, satisfied with that, they refrained from further probing; and, living as we did, privacy was a rare and hard-come-by commodity, greatly valued even when purchased by a falsehood.
I hobbled across to the inner door and opened it, looking into the dim apartment w
hich formed an anteroom to the sleeping apartments. It had a very small window and the tower wall rose sheer outside, so the place was never light enough to work in without candles. In very cold weather, when the solar remained cold despite the heaped fire, we did sometimes use it as a sitting place; with a fire and many candles it was cosy and pleasant. On a bright morning it was inexpressibly dreary.
Berengaria sat on a bench, her elbows on her knees, her chin propped on her linked hands, her eyes fixed on the section of the wall outside the window. She did not turn her head when I opened the door.
‘Berengaria,’ I said.
‘Oh, you’re back, Anna. What do you want?’
‘I want you to come out and listen to some music. I heard a boy performing very well in the market this morning and I persuaded him to come back.’
‘My head aches,’ she said, ‘and the last thing I want is to listen to music.’
My natural impulse was to say, ‘Very well, don’t,’ and to go away and shut the door. But my newborn pity for her was still young and vital at that time and there were other considerations. In a small confined community a settled melancholy in its most important member is not conducive to cheerfulness amongst the others and the general atmosphere in the bower had, of late, been very miserable. So I said:
‘Do come and listen. He plays very well and we shall all enjoy it more if you are there.’
She rose with a sigh of resignation and walked into the solar. I stayed to close the door behind her and when I turned to face the room I had a feeling that something had happened. Berengaria had halted a few paces inside the room and was staring at the boy; her eyes remained expressionless but her mouth, which sometimes betrayed her, was open. Across the room the boy was staring back at her with astonishment and admiration writ large on his face. But that was not to be wondered at, for she was extremely beautiful. We were, of course, accustomed to her loveliness but anyone seeing her for the first time must pay that tribute of the moment’s awe which one pays to a cherry tree in full bloom with the sunlight on it or to one of those scarlet-and-gold sunsets.
