“What can you see to laugh at, Madam?” reproved Hodierna.
“The silk, my dears!” explained Eleanor, looking back at their shocked faces. “What an old fool I’ve been all these years not to think of it!”
Richard stood nonplussed.
“You heard what she said?” asked Ann, when they had finished staring after the Queen, and the sound of Blondel’s following footsteps had died away down the dark turret.
“Of course we all heard,” retorted Hodierna, turning back to her work. “And we all know it’s only people with something on their consciences who need guard their tongues.”
“Besides,” added Henry, moving lazily from the window, “if that malicious sort of gossip means anything you had as much cause for jealousy yourself.”
The French girl, conscious of the shrewdness of his glance, began putting away her embroidery. “Sometimes I hate you so much, Henry, I hope you will die young!” she said, with one last vindictive thrust of her needle.
He smiled imperturbably and, crossing to the littered table, began playing with Hodierna’s great shear-like scissors. “I don’t mind going when the Almighty sees fit to oblige you, of course,” he drawled. “But poisoning, I’m told, is becoming quite a pretty art in France!”
They were always sparring like that, but Richard became aware of some unusual tension. “What the devil d’you mean?” he asked, pushing between them.
Henry dropped the scissors and the light, mocking tone he always adopted with Ann. He surveyed his brother through narrowed eyes, half affectionate and half contemptuous. “To be blunt, my blind armament builder,” he explained suavely, “it’s high time you asked the royal old rip for your betrothed.”
“God damn your insolence!”
Ann screamed as Richard lunged at him, trying to choke the words in his throat. The heavy oak table crashed against the wall, dragging work and scissors with it. The women crouched against it. Although of lighter build, Henry held him off with the cool, maddening smile on his bruised lips. Richard’s eyes went light and golden as an angry, watchful cat’s—the way they always changed in battle. Their auburn heads swayed levelly, and they struggled in silence save for their panting breath and the shuffling of their feet among the rushes.
When Johanna could bear it no longer she slid from the protection of Robin’s arm. “Stop them now!” she begged, and he intervened instantly, dodging their blows with the litheness of some wild forest creature and parting them with such superior strength that he flung each of them to a different corner of the room.
“He’s stronger than either of you!” yelled John, dancing on the stone window seat in an ecstasy of excitement.
“I ought to be strong,” smiled Robin, almost apologetically. “My own father bequeathed me the muscles of a lumberer, and your father had me taught how to use them.”
“Then is it because you’re half a peasant that you use them only to protect old women and to keep the peace?” asked John, jumping down to start one of those interminable arguments which helped them all to bridge over the embarrassment of their ill-controlled passions.
Robin laughed his great, carefree laugh, and Richard joined in sheepishly. Johanna rescued her wooden knights and Ann her silks. Henry’s first thought was for his precious plans; and even while he was wiping the blood from his mouth he remembered that there was something he wanted to ask Richard about that clever curtain wall.
“Peace!” snorted Hodierna, beginning almost automatically to put her Tower room to rights again. “I doubt if you crazy Plantagenets know the meaning of the word!”
Chapter Five
The curfew had clanged from the Keep, echoing through the barbican as the drawbridge was raised for the night, and down in the town the friendly fires were damped out one by one. The King would soon be coming to bed. His servant moved softly in the bedchamber, turning back the crimson covers and setting flaming torches in two tall sconces. He opened the exquisitely illuminated missal on the prie-dieu between them, and put out a pair of riding boots for the morning. And outside, in the great hall, the King’s eldest son waited.
“How long is he likely to be, Gregory?” he asked, with a touch of subservience. For after all, the incorruptible body servant of a king knows more secrets than his sons.
Gregory came down the two shallow steps, carefully closing the heavy oak door behind him. “He should be to bed early, Sir. What with his having to be up early for the assizes, and to-night being Friday—”
“I wonder what he confesses?” speculated Henry.
Gregory never speculated about his betters. Perhaps he had no need to. Instead, he crossed to the window with the dignified tread of the perfect indoor servant. Looking down on to the courtyard of the inner bailey, he was able to offer definite information. “Prince John has persuaded him to play a game of darts. It is getting dark, but I think the King must be staying to see your brother hit the bullseye.”
“Then it looks as if I shall have to kick my heels here half the night,” yawned Henry, stretching them towards a dying fire on the central hearth. To his annoyance, he soon perceived that he would have to kick them in company, for as the departing Gregory flattened himself politely against the serving screen, Richard and Johanna came strolling into the hall.
“Quite a deputation to-night!” remarked Henry, observing that the annoyance was mutual.
Whenever the Plantagenets wanted anything they waylaid their father at this hour when he must pass through the hall to bed. Short of climbing the half flight to the Queen’s room and passing round the gallery and down by the garde-robe turret on the opposite side, he could not escape their importunities. And coming at the end of a hard day, their tactics seldom failed to enrage him.
“What do you want?” enquired Johanna, coming to warm her capable little hands.
Henry reiterated his constant grievance. Ann’s brother Philip, who was still only a spotty weed of seventeen, had been crowned in Paris. “And if the heir to the French throne is crowned during his father’s lifetime,” he argued, “why can’t it be done in this benighted island?”
“You’re beginning to talk like Ann,” said Johanna. “And what does your token crowning matter, anyway, compared with our Mother’s freedom?”
“Don’t worry!” he reassured her. “The King won’t revenge Rosamund’s death on her.”
“But Blondel told us what the people are saying and that he is in one of his rages. He hasn’t seen anyone but Gregory since he came in.”
“Yes, he has. He’s with John now, playing darts. And I rather fancy the rage was partly eyewash, my dear. He had to blame somebody.”
“You think he was getting bored with this bower business and wasn’t altogether sorry?” asked Richard, in the impersonal way in which they always discussed their father’s love affairs.
“And probably knows the real murderer. What is your grievance, Johanna?”
“Sicily, of course.” She looked covertly from one to the other of them. They’d ruled their duchies on the Continent and been in battle, but she knew that in their hearts they were still half afraid of their affectionate, tyrannical father. “I wish you two would let me beard him first before my courage fails!” she sighed. It was a rule of their own making that they should do so in order of age, and she did not for a moment suppose that Henry would waive his priority.
“And get the old lion thoroughly roused before I ask for Ann,” teased Richard, who would probably give way to her.
“Why do you want Ann?” she asked, momentarily side-tracked from her own troubles.
Richard laughed shortly, staring into the fire. “I don’t—particularly. But no man likes to look a fool. She and I have been betrothed since we were about six, and he still won’t let me have her. Besides, I suppose I shall have to marry someone, and at least I’ve known Ann too long to have to pay her silly compliments.”
Johanna regarded him with puzzled concern. “But you don’t love her.”
“My dear Johanna
,” remonstrated Henry, kicking the embers into a blaze, “I should have thought that after learning your own fate you would realise that the last place one looks for love is in a marriage of our kind!”
It seemed unbelievable that they should accept it so casually, like having an ugly dance partner or a fever; while to her it was everything—and final. But then, of course, for a man it was so different. “Oh, well, you can always shut her up in one of your grimmest castles with her everlasting needlework and ride off on a crusade or something. And I suppose her dowry would come in useful,” she agreed.
“If I ever get it!” said Richard. “I’m sure the King is holding up my marriage because of John.”
Johanna went and sat by the narrow window from which she could watch the filial little scene in the courtyard. John must have said something excruciatingly funny because the page who was scoring was doubled up with laughter, and even the servants were tittering as they stooped to pick up the darts. Although he often got them punished, they liked him because he listened to their gossip and mimicked the priests and learned professors who thronged the town. He had none of his brothers’ fierce, competitive pride, and his cheerful acceptance of defeat in the darts contest had flattered his middle-aged father into the mood of jocular indulgence natural to his leisure hours. “What has John to do with it?” she asked.
Richard came and set a foot on the window seat beside her. The supper torches had almost burned out and a full moon rising above the river threw a bar of silver across the floor. “Don’t you see, Joan,” he said, beginning to talk in the intimate way she loved, “that if Henry got killed and Ann and I had children, they would come between that little lap-dog and the throne?”
“If Henry got killed?” Her startled gaze wandered to the fair, clever face of her eldest brother thrown into relief by the flickering firelight.
“Modern warfare is such a gamble,” he pointed out. “I once saw six knights wiped out by one stone from a catapult.”
Johanna was too absorbed by a new idea to care about war statistics. Her gaze came back to the beloved face so near to her own. “Why, if Henry got killed you would almost certainly become King of England! ‘Richard the First.’” She savoured the title slowly. “Doesn’t it sound strange?”
“Not very,” answered Richard lightly. “You see, I’ve had to think of it before—when Henry and I have been at each other’s throats, mostly. It’s the one thing that’s restrained me from killing him when he’s being clever.”
He threw an apologetic smile over his shoulder and Henry—who was only half listening—grinned back without resentment. “Most ambitious men wouldn’t let it restrain them!” he remarked absently.
For the first time Johanna saw these two brothers of hers not merely in relation to herself, but in relation to the world. Not just as Henry and Richard, who had played at “Christians and Saracens,” but as people of great potential importance. She realised that the knowledge of their destiny must always have been in their hearts, setting them apart even from Robin, and that the loneliness they shared forged them together more strongly than their feuds of temperament drove them apart. “Don’t you want to be king, Richard?” she asked.
The silvery half-light seemed to have softened his hard young face into unwonted thoughtfulness. “Robin thinks that kings are consecrated to their countries and ought to stay and look after their people instead of fighting abroad. And I want to lead the most efficient, best equipped crusade—”
The word “crusade” always provoked attention. “How you do listen to that madman’s ideas!” interrupted Henry.
“So many people say mad when they mean new,” snapped Johanna, getting up from the window seat. “Of course, Robin’s kind of cleverness is quite different from yours. Much kinder, and more constructive.”
Henry listened to her vigorous attack with lazy amusement. When she blazed into defensive anger like that she was quite a little beauty.
“When I do get my crown, I suppose you’ll be wheedling me into letting you marry a tall, dark commoner,” he teased, remembering Ann’s spiteful innuendoes.
“It will be too late then. I shall be Queen of Sicily. Oh God, I wish I were a goatherd!”
“You’d hate their smell,” he reminded her.
Johanna began pacing the floor as she and Richard both did in moments of strong emotion. “I shall tell the King I won’t be sold like a slave to an old horror whose touch must be revolting. I’ll tell him I won’t be a helpless brood mare in a horrible volcano-ridden country—”
“Go to it, girl!” urged Richard, taking up a spectator’s seat on one of the retainers’ long tables as firm, familiar footsteps approached from the bailey steps. He had hardly said the words when the leather curtain by the serving screen was jerked sharply aside and Henry the Second stood, thick-set and capable, against a wall tapestry woven by generations of Plantagenet women to immortalise the exploits of his ancestors. At forty, there was nothing romantic about this Angevin who had once fluttered the dovecotes of Europe. His short, serviceable riding tunic was still dusty from the highways, and only a heavy-jowled bloodhound followed at his heels. With a shuddering breath his youngest daughter got up and ran to him. “Oh, Sir—” she entreated, from obeisant billows of green velvet at his feet.
“My little maid! What brings you here so late?” His deep, husky voice was kind. He stooped to raise her, caressing her cheek with strong, spatulate fingers.
It was his wrath the others feared but, being a girl, she found his kindness more difficult to bear. “This marriage—” she began bravely.
He looked pleased. “So your mother has told you our wishes? And I suppose you are wanting some new gowns and pretty gewgaws?”
Scorn of the way John traded on his affection made her slip from the comforting approval of his arm. “No, Sir. It isn’t that. Because I won’t—won’t—”
“Be sold like a slave,” prompted Richard, from his seat in the shadows behind her.
Half over-hearing him, the King turned in quick irritation and caught Henry making a gesture of ribald encouragement. His eyes were growing angry in his weather-beaten face. “My confessor is waiting, and I must get some sleep,” he snapped, crossing the hall towards his bedroom.
He was going, and no one else could help her unhappiness. In her urgency, Johanna clutched at his arm. “Oh, please, please! It has all been so wonderful. The hawking on the dear English hills—the minstrels singing in the lighted hall—the fun we had when the river froze at Christmas,” she implored brokenly, clutching pictures at random to illustrate the short book of her life. “Don’t send me away! Don’t make me marry a stranger!”
The King stopped in his straddling stride to stare down at her in amazement. The baffled, rather pathetic amazement of a parent seeing for the first time a stranger where his child has stood; humiliated, perhaps, by a glimpse of the pity with which the child has been defending him against the discovery for years. “Tch! A pack of whimsies!” he exclaimed, taking refuge in the thought-saving clichés that each generation in turn mouths at the next. “You modern girls, with your cruises to Palestine, and your hair worn without a wimple, and your new notions about choosing your own husband! I can see we have allowed you to run wild too long. It’s high time you settled down with the man provided for you like your sisters before you.”
The rare tears fell unheeded from her hazel-green eyes. “If I may not choose,” she begged, “at least find me someone who would care for the same sort of things! Someone—younger.”
“There is my friend, Sholto of Navarre,” ventured Richard, who never could bear to see a woman cry.
His father turned on him with all the pent-up aggravation caused by his quarrelling on the Continent. “Are you presuming to teach me my trade? You who, with your brothers, have turned Normandy and Aquitaine into a bear garden!” he raged. “How would an alliance with Navarre help to preserve the balance of power in Europe? You irresponsible young egoists see no further than your own petty
piece of the pattern; while all my life I have been preventing bloodshed by balancing power, no more able to relax than some miserable juggler in full gaze of a fair.”
The querulous note of a strong man ageing had crept into the King’s arresting voice. A few grey hairs had already begun to soften the aggressive colour of his hair from which his children had inherited only enough for beauty, and the energy it betokened had driven him so hard that both work and pleasure had begun to take their toll. “You think only of war, but diplomacy is the key to progress. And I ask you, where would diplomacy be without daughters?”
He turned to the one still to be bartered, not unkindly, but as if he had forgotten her tears in the vortex of things that really mattered. “Get back to your mother, girl,” he ordered, “and tell her that if she cannot manage this wedding without any more fuss she may as well go back to Salisbury.”
“Oh, no—not that. I will obey you,” promised Johanna.
As soon as she was gone the King rounded sternly on his sons. His hot eyes glared at them, but subconsciously it was Eleanor whom he blamed. “And you two? What do you want?” he barked.
“To be crowned now—in your lifetime—like Philip Capet,” said Henry.
“Full control of my lands and revenues in Aquitaine so that I can afford to marry Ann,” demanded Richard, sliding off the trestle to join him.
“Lands! Lands! Lands! Till there’s not a mouldering manor left for John.” Reluctantly, their father came back and sat in the chair Henry had vacated. “And all this insubordinate talk about marriage…One wants to marry and another won’t.” He slumped a little in the chair, and his favourite old hound flopped heavily at his feet. “I am getting on for fifty now, Henry, and weary of it.”
“The more reason, Sir, why you should pass on some of the responsibility to me.” Henry spoke with cool restraint, but Richard was still raw from seeing Johanna hurt. “You sent me to fight for my possession of Aquitaine when I was no older than John,” he stormed, “and if you will not let me rule it independently and get married, by God’s beard, I will do homage to Louis of France!”
Passionate Brood Page 4
