Richard turned at the touch of her hand, but it was quite clear from his blank stare that for the moment he had forgotten she was there. Although he was hers there would often be moments when, like Ann, she would be made to feel an outsider. But—unlike Ann—she would always have power to reclaim him with a touch. His hand closed over hers now, and he smiled down at her reassuringly. “I am sorry, Johanna,” he apologised at once. “I spoke like a fool—because I was hurt—forgetting that you loved him too.”
If the words elucidated things a little for Raymond, somehow they jarred him badly. He had thought of Johanna as someone coming through widowhood into untrammelled freedom. She had stood apart, battling with disappointment and hurt pride, and it was her turn for play-acting now. “I was rather young then, wasn’t I?” she said negligently. Stepping down from the window embrasure, she flicked her skirts at a grey Persian kitten Tancred had sent her and laughed when it bounced after her along the floor. And just to show them that there were other men in the world besides Robin, she sat down next to Raymond and began deliberately trying to attract him. She appeared to have forgotten that he had come uninvited to her party and she neither knew nor cared that he was far too fine to endure being made use of.
Richard accepted her attitude with relief. “And what about you, Mother? Are you coming on with us to look up all those Syrian lovers of yours whom old Louis waxed so jealous about? Just to show Raymond he’s not the only old campaigner present.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Richard!” laughed Eleanor. “You know very well if Henry had lived to run this crusade with you instead of Philip he wouldn’t have allowed any women at all. But if you can’t do without them”—she moved aside a spray of roses in order to nod pleasantly to her future daughter-in-law—“well, at least let them be young and beautiful.” The gallant old Queen sighed, remembering perhaps what fun she had had at Antioch; then added briskly, “Besides, I had better go back and keep an eye on things in England.”
Richard got up and rinsed his fingers, drying them thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should have been wiser to send you officially as my regent,” he said.
But Eleanor’s eyes twinkled. She knew how the irascible little Longchamps would resent such an appointment. “I will just go back as the besotted old watchdog I’ve been for you ever since you were breeched,” she decided.
“But I thought you had another son to keep an eye on England, Madam?” said Raymond, politely extricating himself from Johanna’s embarrassing attentions.
“That’s just why,” they told him cryptically.
He shrugged helplessly. “Mad—quite mad!” he murmured, catching Berengaria’s amused glance.
Richard clapped him on the shoulder and invited Berengaria to come and look once more at his wonderful ships. She loved the way they sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, painting deep purple shadows on the water; but they meant nothing to her, rope by rope, as they did to the understanding of the island-bred Johanna. Secretly, she wished she could be done with ships and spend her honeymoon peacefully on dry land. But at least they were bigger than the uncomfortable little fishing boat and no one, she supposed optimistically, could be sick or frightened with Richard on board.
“Look, the French fleet is beginning to weigh anchor,” cried Johanna, curling herself up on the window seat with the unstudied ease of a boy.
“Oh, good!” breathed Berengaria, feeling released from the untiring tentacles of Ann.
But Richard did not seem to think it so good after all. “Philip has more ships than I,” he remarked, watching them sort themselves out from the Normans and the English.
“That must be unbearable for you!” mocked Eleanor, still sitting at table peeling a pear.
The others laughed but Richard continued to scowl, counting them as they moved majestically towards the open sea. Already a following wind was billowing out the golden lilies on their sails. Berengaria squeezed his arm. “You are thinking, aren’t you, that but for me you would be in virtual command of both fleets?” she asked, a little forlornly.
“No, no, of course not,” he denied hastily, realising with a momentary stab of dismay that his thoughts would never be quite his own property again. “But I must push after him soon. I can’t let all Europe say I left him to raise the siege of Acre single-handed.”
“I am ready to start whenever you like,” she offered.
Richard took both her hands between his own the way he did when men swore fealty to him. “I shouldn’t think any man was ever so blessed in his womenfolk,” he said, smiling down at her tenderly. “But the devil of it is we shall have to sail separately.”
“W-why?” faltered Berengaria.
“Well, my sweet, now that we are together at last it is already April. And you must see that, as a soldier of the cross, I cannot marry in Lent.”
Berengaria gave a little gasp and sat down beside Johanna, staring at him. Here was a complication which had never occurred to her. In the gay, go-ahead court of Navarre her education had been intellectual rather than religious, so that the ruling of the church seemed harsh. She had come so far and given so much for Richard’s sake, and already their barely tasted romance was turning into disagreeable reality. She saw herself tossing about indefinitely on rough seas, without either the comfort of her home or the thrill of a husband. She felt like crying, but supposed these strong-minded Plantagenet women would only despise her for it. Instinctively, she turned to her cousin—the one person who was always so reliably sane.
“Raymond, what do you think?” she asked, almost beseechingly.
Raymond was a crusader too, and recognised the unseemliness of a royal marriage feast in Lent. But recognising also the pathetic signal of her fluttering lashes, he suggested something soothing about a message to the Pope.
But Richard was adamant. Besides being a crusader, he was deeply and simply religious. Plenty of people, he knew, were going to the Holy Land because they loved adventure. They could not love it more than he. But the very simplicity of his nature made it possible for him to keep his real goal quite clearly before him. Focusing his vision upon the far-off end of endeavour, he could always see the red cross of Christendom crowning the hills of Jerusalem. He wanted that more than anything in the world. He saw himself on his knees offering it to Christ. The gift, of course, would be Christ’s—but his—Richard’s—would be the power and the glory. And this splendid goal was coming nearer and nearer until soon, he felt sure, it would be a definite fact for all the world to see. He was not to know that only the hardness and heartbreak of the task could ever teach him to want Christ to have the city, without caring whether it were Richard Plantagenet or some other who gave it to Him. Even though by that time he himself might have become the greatest crusader of them all.
Berengaria shivered a little, as if recognising in his stern adherence to his vows a fanaticism that could out-grow love, just as Richard detected in her something of the tolerant humanitarianism which had seemed to him almost pagan in Robin. But in the high noon of their love these things were as yet but unlengthened shadows. Berengaria knew only that she had keyed herself up to surrender to his frightening but delicious urgency and now found herself in the humiliating position of rebelling against his continence. Sancho the Wise had taught her to respect the mental processes of all sorts and conditions of men, and she herself was too fastidious to pit her physical lures against a man’s conscience. But the fact that their marriage was to be delayed through no lack of ardour did not make things easier for either of them.
“You can sail in the Bishop of Beauvais’ galley and we will be married in Syria at Easter,” said Richard.
“That will be best, I suppose,” agreed Berengaria. Then, remembering Eleanor—that tower of strength—would be going back to England, she added involuntarily, “But, oh, Richard, I shall be so lonely!”
Johanna turned suddenly from her contemplation of the fleet. “I will come with you,” she offered.
They stared at her in surprise.
“I thought you said you were counting the days to get back to England and the hawking and the comfortable green hills?” said Eleanor.
But all savour had gone out of these things. How could one bear the sight of beech trees without the sound of Robin’s voice or come home from hunting without the kindness of his smile? “It will probably be more amusing in Syria,” said Johanna casually. “And in spite of Tancred I am still a respectable widow, so I shall be able to chaperon the bride-to-be.”
“Would you really do that for us?” Richard wrung her hand as if she were a man, and Berengaria kissed her. “It is going to be wonderfully different for me having a sister!” she said gratefully.
Raymond wanted to tell Johanna that she had won her spurs like a good knight—coming through suffering and humbled pride to courage and generosity. He wanted to beg forgiveness for looking on her humiliation and to cry aloud that she was beautiful. But because he could not bear her smiling at him cheaply he was dumb.Gallantly, she threw off the fetters of her resentment. “So it has all come true!” she cried, going to her brother with a radiant smile. “The splendid ships and the shared adventure. All that your old witch promised us, Richard.”
“Even to the charmed life, I hope,” he laughed, putting his home-made ring back on her finger next to William’s costly one.
“Did she really promise you that?” Berengaria didn’t really believe in witches but, after seeing the arrows that had whistled about his head that morning, she was ready to grasp at any sort of assurance.
“There was a proviso, of course,” admitted Eleanor, wiping her fingers after her fruit.
“There always is,” laughed Raymond. “It lets the old witch out if anything goes wrong.”
But Eleanor was quite serious about it. “Because Robin made him save her from a ducking or something, she says no one can kill Richard so long as he fights in a just cause.”
“And you couldn’t have a juster cause than crusading, so why worry?” said Raymond cheerfully.
Eleanor rose from the table and kissed Richard on either cheek. Tall as she was, she had to reach up to place her hands on his shoulders. “So God will keep you, my son, for my old eyes to see again,” she prophesied resolutely.
Richard’s hands closed hard over hers, and Berengaria created a diversion in order to leave them alone a little longer in their world which she was so soon to invade. “My dower chests!” she exclaimed. “They are still down in that verminous hut.”
“Blondel will have seen to them,” Johanna assured her.
“And I do hope Yvette will be happy. Both her parents died of the plague, you know.”
“No need to worry about her. Yvette is such an attractive little person, Blondel won’t miss the opportunity of seeing to her too.”
Richard came and slipped an arm through Berengaria’s, drawing her towards the door. “Let us all go down and bait Tancred now those Frenchmen have gone,” he suggested.
But Raymond lingered a moment with Johanna. “Thank you for offering to sail with my cousin—and for your party,” he said. Evidently, Johanna was beginning to realise how badly she had treated him, and to cover her embarrassment he went on lightly, “This Blondel of yours sounds invaluable. I remember how he requisitioned one of my best shirts for your brother at Pamplona.”
For the first time Johanna looked at him with real friendliness. “Come to think of it, I don’t know what we should do without him,” she laughed. “He is the perfect squire. Mends all the things we break and finds all the things our mother loses. In fact, if Richard himself got lost I imagine Blondel would find him.”
Part V
Cyprus
Chapter Seventeen
Richard and Berengaria were not married in Syria after all. The ships which had looked so fine off Dover and Messina were tossed about like cockleshells on an angry Mediterranean for weeks. Only the riding light of Richard’s red-sailed flagship by night and the coercion of his cheerful voice by day kept them together in any semblance of a fleet. Battered by the storm and beaten out of their course, some of them finally found shelter under the lee of Cyprus.
If Richard had profited by what his elder brother had said about bringing women, his great galley Trenchemer and several of his troopships could probably have made Beirut. But news came that Isaac Comnenos, the thick-lipped, plausible little emperor of the island, was plundering the Bishop’s ship as she lay helpless off Limassol and trying to persuade him to bring the European women ashore. Berengaria and Yvette were by that time far too sea-sick to care what happened to them; but Richard could remember laughing over Picot’s bawdy stories about Isaac’s overcrowded harem, and his voice became full of profanity instead of cheer. He put the Trenchemer about, called for landing parties from the rest of the ships, and treated the inhospitable port of Limassol much as he had treated Messina.
Isaac fled inland to the hills and for three whole days Richard fought up and down the island until he caught him and sent him back to the coast in chains. And then quite suddenly he had time to notice that the spring flowers were in bloom and that it was no longer Lent. After fighting the sea for three weeks and the Cypriots for as many days, he ought to have been too exhausted to do anything but sleep. But instead he decided it was time to get married.
Riding down from Mount Troodos with a following of weary knights, he turned in the saddle to grin persuasively at his gifted squire. “Make me a song for my wedding night, Blondel!” he ordered.
“Considering the bride’s beauty, you’d better make it pretty amorous!” advised Barbe Vidomar, the black-visaged Count of Chalus, enviously.
“And considering the bridegroom’s long Lenten fast, Blondel, you’d better make it before to-morrow night!” chuckled jolly old Sansterre of Mortaine.
Pursued by a gust of their friendly laughter, the prospective bridegroom spurred on ahead across the sandy plain. The storm seemed to have spent itself with his battle rage and the peace of eventide hung over Cyprus. Flat on the rim of the Mediterranean he could see the walls of Limassol. Caravans of haughty camels padded past him bearing the wealth of the Levant to Nicosia, and shepherds led their patient, black-faced goats to folds at scattered farms. “This is really the beginning of the East,” exulted Richard, catching passing glimpses of olive-skinned women preparing an evening meal in the walled yards of their little flat-roofed homes.
Some of his men were already fraternising with the Greeks, dallying with dark-eyed girls as they drew water from the wells and quenching their thirst from native pigskins. Some were merely rowdy and others were quite openly looting. Once or twice, in the short twilight, men hurtled almost under his horse, chasing some dusky beauty. It was amusing to hear the jackdaws imitate their tipsy laughter and the shrill, inviting screams of the girls. Had Richard been engaged on some stern campaign he would have controlled them with iron discipline; but here on this lovely, lazy island after their cramped tedium aboard ship, he shut his eyes to it.
Only once did he interfere—and his interference cost England a queen.
As he rode into Limassol he saw a girl run from the shelter of a house pursued by two English archers. She neither screamed nor giggled, but ran with the grace of a deer along the narrow street towards him, eluding their grasp by inches. From the shadow of the city gate Richard watched the chase dispassionately, much as he might have followed the cunning of some hard-pressed deer. She ran so close that he could hear the quick sob of her breath, and when one of the soldiers grabbed away her cloak he noticed that she was little more than a child. Instantly, his gorge rose.
“Get back to camp or I’ll slit your throats!” he thundered. At the sound of his voice both men slunk away up some back street as if they had seen the devil, and the girl was left, panting and dishevelled, leaning against the city wall.
“You got what you asked for, hanging about the streets when men have done fighting,” Richard told her sharply, “Go back to your father’s house.”
She raised beseeching
, dark-lashed eyes. Even in the half light he could see that she was slender as one of the young palm trees that grew on Troodos, and that her small breasts were still pulsating like the heart of a frightened animal. “My father has been taken prisoner,” she said.
“Well, haven’t you a mother—or some woman to look after you?” he asked irritably. But her answer came pat. “They are all with your soldiers”—and that seemed to make it his responsibility. He could hear Mortaine and Barbe of Chalus and the rest of them coming along the road behind and was in no mood to be chaffed on the subject of knight-errantry as well as matrimony. Almost angrily he stuck out a foot. “Jump!” he ordered. And light as thistledown she set her bare foot upon his mailed one and let him pull her to the saddle before him. With a click of his tongue he set the great war-horse in motion again towards the Emperor’s citadel where he had taken up his abode. As the girl swayed against his shoulder she smiled up at him shyly, her teeth like small square pearls in the childish oval of her face. “I saw you wade ashore waving your great battle-axe. Is it true that you killed a lion?” she asked naïvely.
Perhaps Richard was flattered that she knew him. “I’m afraid I’ve never met one,” he laughed more amiably. “What is your name? And how is it you speak French so well?”
“My name is Ida, and we had French tutors when we were small.”
Now that she was so close he noticed that she smelled sweet and that there were silver bangles on her arms. “I will have you taken home,” he said.
But she shook her head so that the top of her short, dark curls brushed his cheek. “My home has been taken over by a thieving Anglo-Norman,” she told him fearlessly.
“Find me the man and I will punish him,” he promised.
“What would you do to him? Slit his throat?”
Passionate Brood Page 15
