“Since you won’t eat with us,” ordered Richard suavely, “I should like you to dance for our guests.”
The girl recoiled as if he had struck her. De Lusignon quite expected her to refuse. But she had seen Berengaria’s hand creep restrainingly to Richard’s. “I would sooner he had me whipped naked before them all than be spared through that woman’s intercession!” Ida told herself, in the hysterical exaggeration of her first young passion. Besides, she had wanted to dance for him and here was her opportunity. She looked round disdainfully at the perspiring acrobats clearing their paraphernalia from the centre of the hall and saw rows of amused or admiring faces turned towards her and the stern, aesthetic countenance of the Templars who, according to the rules of their order, did not look at her at all…“But I will make them!” she thought, piqued by their indifference. She smiled up at the bridegroom sitting among his principal guests on the dais. “I promised I would dance for you—didn’t I—that night when you carried me home on your saddle?” she said, spitefully glad that Berengaria should hear.
She called something in Greek to the native musicians and they played a pastorale on their pipes and zithers. Without fuss or self-consciousness, she began to dance to the fawn-like melody…“She’s quite good!” they all agreed, pleasantly lulled by the innocuous measure, and out of the corners of her kohled eyes she noticed some of them who fancied their virtuosity beating time a little condescendingly. Here was an opportunity to befool those men who had humiliated her country, using the only kind of weapon she knew. She snapped her fingers to a pot-bellied little man who had played for years at her father’s orgies and he changed the tune to an obscene little nasal song. His beady eyes twinkled as his soft, fleshy palms beat out the rhythm on his drums and Ida gave Berengaria’s wedding guests a dance of the back streets and the brothels. Those who had glanced casually between mouthfuls at the jaded antics of the mountebanks and conversed through the customary minstrels’ songs laid down their knives, watching the allure of Ida. Because she was young and supple and well-born she stirred men’s senses as no hardened harlot could have done. And because she brought to the age-old gestures of enticement something of the freshness of a mountain stream, even white-robed monks forgot their vows. As she turned and swayed to the wicked rhythm of the drums, she watched the Templars’ faces. But she danced primarily for Richard, and many of her countrymen—standing about with the sullenness of the vanquished—spat their disgust.
Richard had seen plenty of varieties of the dance in Raymond’s ports of southern France and—as always—the hot, insistent undertone of the drums was the mysterious heart of the East calling to him. But he sat frowning, feeling it was all wrong that this lovely, undisciplined child should be dancing before them—and angrily aware that she had taken a rise out of him. The girl was making herself as insistent as the drums, and he regretted trying to subdue her. Berengaria and the convent-bred Yvette, he could see, were painfully embarrassed; and when the girl had gone Johanna said bluntly, “Well, with all our dower chests of fashionable new clothes we cannot compete with that!”
The men sitting near them, released from Ida’s Circe appeal, laughed a little sheepishly. “I suppose you’re keeping her as a hostage?” enquired de Lusignon.
“Looks as if the little bitch ’ud prefer to be kept as his mistress!” guffawed Barbe of Chalus, already in his cups.
“I wish you would let the girl go!” sighed Berengaria, ignoring his provincial coarseness. “She is going to be a grave responsibility.” As if to dismiss the subject, she turned graciously to de Lusignon. “I shall always boast to all my friends that we had the King of Jerusalem at our wedding,” she told him. “And I know you are the one person in the world whom Richard has been aching to talk to.”
Inevitably the two men fell upon the subject nearest their hearts and, with a dozen different knights joining in, poor Berengaria’s wedding feast soon degenerated into a council of war.
“Have you ever seen Saladin?” those fresh out from Europe wanted to know.
But even the most seasoned Templars seemed never to have done so. “He is one of those leaders who know the publicity value of an elusive personality,” said de Lusignon. “But he has more than once given us Christians a lesson in chivalry.”
“Does he still cut in when our men are on the march?” asked Raymond, who had served as a very fledgling knight under de Barre.
“Lord, yes! It’s simply uncanny how the hills look bare one minute and his ferocious hordes are upon you the next, picking off half a company before our heavily equipped fellows can close their ranks.”
“You’ll come to hate those bare hills, Sir,” a gnarled old Templar told the tall Angevin leader of this new crusade.
Richard drank in their words. This was the real thing at first hand. “I remember my mother telling me how lightly the Saracens were mounted, and I used to plan how—if ever I had the luck to get there—I would sacrifice speed to security by making my men march in close formation,” he said.
“The difficulty about slow marches across those plains is the provisioning,” pointed out Raymond, “How are you going to make the water last out?”
“I should hug the coast. Not waste a single man or horse for porterage who could be used for fighting.” Richard was all eagerness, expounding his pet theory. Fruit dishes and finger bowls were pushed out of the way, and every available knife pressed into service to form a rough map of the Levant. Men rose and leaned across each other’s shoulders to look. “It always seemed to me that Louis and his crowd neglected their naval strength. We’ve got plenty of ships. Why can’t we arrange for them to call at each port regularly with supplies?”
“Shounds all right,” admitted Chaìus. “But given the foul storms we’ve had, how many weeks d’you sup-poshe it’ll take them to come from France or England?”
“Only a drunken fool would expect them to come from there!” barked Richard, always rattled to rudeness by the way the impertinent little curmudgeon crabbed all his best ideas. “Look, here’s Cyprus.” He planked down a plate in the middle of the coastline of knives. “An admirable permanent base—and mine.”
Raymond backed up the new idea with enthusiasm. “There’s an excellent harbour further north at Famagusta. It would pay us to leave a garrison and fortify the place.”
“And when you’ve got your supply system working regularly?” prompted Mortaine.
“I’d force the enemy to play my game. Keep away from the hills where he has all the advantages and concentrate on the coastal towns. Mew him up and—” Richard caught a Templar’s sceptic eye and stopped short. “God’s heart, what must you think of me, ranting away in front of a lot of experienced crusaders like this?” he laughed, reddening like any schoolboy and subsiding into his chair.
But Guy de Lusignon had begun to see in this powerful redhead’s enthusiasm new hope for his jaded supporters. He was willing to try anything to get back his throne. “Go on,” he said quietly, waving Richard back to his improvised map. “Your idea certainly holds new possibilities.”
Men came from other tables, crowding round. Berengaria saw their tense faces. Squires with famous names and rich merchants’ sons, their smooth, young faces shining with eagerness—the sex appeal of Ida forgotten as they reached for the Fata Morgana of fame. Scarred old war-dogs like Mortaine listening tolerantly. The servants moving softly. The torches burning low and no one daring to change them. Johanna, listening intently, eaten with family pride. The round wonder in Yvette’s blue eyes. She herself, a bride, half proud and half resentful. And in the middle of it all her handsome lover, whom men already called Coeur de Lion, telling them how to plan a campaign.
“You see, we’ve better battering rams and scaling ladders,” he was explaining with engaging diffidence. “And I feel that, considering their superior numbers, we ought never to risk open engagements on the plains until we’ve taken most of the key points along the coast. The fact of the matter is, my brother Henry and I were always t
erribly keen about armaments. People used to tell us the walls of Jerusalem were almost impregnable, so I spent years studying architecture under Maurice, the man who was building Dover castle for my father. He helped me to make calculations and get out designs for a sort of super catapult. I tried it out at the siege of Taillebourg.”
“What’s it like?” demanded Lusignon.
“Well, it’s mounted on the usual kind of wooden platform on rollers.”
“They waste too much time where you have to bridge or fill in a moat,” objected Chalus.
“No need to do either,” said Richard, too carried away by his subject this time to resent the interruption. “This model of mine has sufficient resilience to sling stones from the far side of the widest moat into the best battlemented bailey ever built. By means of a heavy beam twisted so tightly between two sets of ropes that it generates a tremendous force—but I’ll show you. Mercadier has brought one ashore,”
He pushed back his chair, and they would have streamed out after him like hounds on a scent had not Berengaria caught at his arm. “Oh, Richard,” she protested, “not to-night!”
Richard smiled down at her. “I will come back soon, sweet. But de Lusignon knows the actual walls of Jerusalem and can give me expert advice—”
“Once he’s got somebody worked up about his old war machines he’ll probably forget to come back at all!” warned Johanna.
So Berengaria was firm. “No, Richard. You’ve fought ever since we landed. Yesterday you were travelling down from the mountains, and last night you sat up arranging all this.” She waved regretfully towards the remains of the iced castles and all that was left of her banquet. “It was so beautiful,” she sighed. “But what was the good of it if you’ve forgotten so soon that we are married?”
Everybody laughed and the eager youngsters tried to look as if they didn’t mind her breaking in upon their apprenticeship to fame. Richard put an arm round her and said she was perfectly right. He even seemed to enjoy the novelty of giving up his bachelor freedom. He had not yet learned that marriage, unlike his casual loves, could clash with his career.
Perceiving that the party was over, their guests began to drift tactfully away. The King of Jerusalem kissed Berengaria’s hand. “We must see your stone-slinger in the morning,” he called to Richard, “and wish you an envious good night.”
Johanna kissed her new sister-in-law on both cheeks. “May you always get your own way as easily!” she whispered.
Yvette ran on ahead to put out her mistress’s night wrap and Blondel shouted to the Comnenos’ major-domo for torches to light the bride to bed. Richard lingered over a last drink with his sister and Raymond, talking over old times.
“D’you remember that awful night at Oxford when it all came out about Ann and I tried to teach you to dance?” asked Johanna. “And Henry teased you about Sancho’s sister? And you said, ‘God help me, shall I have to dance with her!”
“He didn’t need to dance,” recalled Raymond, wishing himself tall and carelessly attractive.
“Funny!” mused Richard, setting down his empty cup. “If it hadn’t been for Ann I should never have gone to Navarre!”
When his shadow had passed out of sight on the curved wall of the stair Johanna looked round at the disordered hall and sighed.
“Come out into the garden,” suggested Raymond. “There is nothing so depressing as the dregs of a party.”
“Except the dregs of one’s life,” said Johanna. As she passed out into the garden she thought of the mockery of her own marriage. Of William’s consideration and his impotence. She brushed roughly past a trailing vine, hating its exotic beauty because her heart was hungry for green hills and the deep, dappled shade of beech trees. “Robin—Robin—” cried the ghost of her happy childhood. She could almost feel the wind in her hair, hear the scuffle of her flying feet searching for him around the battlements. But Isaac’s garden was heavy with the scent of spices, and the only sounds were the splashing of his fountain and the distant sweetness of some shepherd’s pipe. “What a night for love!” she murmured, glancing up at the landward tower where a light still shone from Berengaria’s window.
Most men as much in love as Raymond would have taken up the challenge of her words. But his long friendship with his cousin had made him wise and patient with a woman’s moods. He stood in the shadow of a cypress tree worshipping the clear-cut fairness of Johanna’s upturned face. “There will be plenty of other magic nights,” he said, without touching her. “And if I wait long enough, please God, one of them may be ours.”
Chapter Nineteen
Am I forgiven about the war’ conference?” enquired Richard, grinning down at Berengaria from the doorway of their bridal chamber.
Seeing him there, Berengaria’s heart missed a beat.
“I wish I were more like Johanna,” she sighed, realising that she had married the kind of man women always do forgive. “She adores all this military excitement. But then, of course, she’s so like you. Your minds are brave and spacious, and I’m such a home-loving creature!”
She looked anything but homely in the silver lamé wrap Yvette was fastening, and, as always, Richard’s pulses quickened at sight of her. “Just the sort of wife a soldier wants as an antidote to war!” he laughed, leaning against the wide, open fireplace. Even in May this southern bride of his liked a fire, and the flickering light behind him made a wavy silhouette of his long limbs. He glanced round at the rich Byzantine furnishings with faint disapproval. “You do realise, don’t you, that all the home we shall have for months will be a captured fortress or a camp? Shall you mind very much?”
Berengaria sat down on the end of the low, wide bed and said firmly, “I must get used to it.” But she was secretly dismayed by the prospect and, as if determined to cling to the amenities of civilised life until the last possible moment, she picked up her jewelled toilet box and asked Yvette to brush her hair.
“Have you a headache after all that ceremonial pother?” asked Richard. He came and lifted the gold circlet from her forehead and pulled up a stool beside her. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get you a better crown,” he said, twirling Chalus’s circlet between his knees. “I shall have to make up for it with a grand coronation for the benefit of my Saxons.”
He was so dear and unemotional and natural, making it easier for her to get used to having him wandering about her bedroom. “Tell us about England,” she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling with shy awareness of their thrilling new intimacy, “Yvette used to believe that curious legend that all the men had long tails!”
Her youngest lady laid down her brush protestingly. “Oh, Madam, I was quite a child then!”
“You are not much more now, are you?” teased Richard. “And, anyway, you’ve got it all wrong, Yvette. What most of us islanders suffer from is short tempers. And sometimes they hurt damnably.” He sat staring into the fire while she put away the stately wedding dress and turned down the bedcover which Eleanor had embroidered and brought from England.
“I think I must have read everything ever written about your island and driven people crazy asking questions about it,” Berengaria was saying. “So I don’t imagine I shall feel strange.” By a process of wishful thinking she skipped the months when he would be fighting his precious crusade and thought only of the time when they would be living in what Yvette called “a proper country” again. “After all, I already know most of your family.”
“Except John and—Arthur,” agreed Richard.
Berengaria guessed that the second name was only a substitute. She always knew when he was brooding about Robin, and now it occurred to her that he must have been wishing him there all day just as she had wanted her parents. She would have liked to comfort him, but somehow did not dare. She thanked Yvette a little absently and bade her good night.
“Good night, Madam—and Sir,” added Yvette, not quite sure whether she ought to curtsey twice.
Richard swung round on his stool. Her naïveté ne
ver failed to amuse him. “Come here, Yvette,” he said, feeling in the wallet of his belt for a string of quaintly carved beads he had chosen specially for her. “I want you to wear these for taking such good care of my bride. I shall tell King Sancho you are worth all the staid old court dowagers he could have sent.”
“Oh, Sir!” gasped Yvette, breathless with delight.
“Blue as your eyes!” he said, getting up to fasten the beads himself. “And now go and tell Blondel I shan’t want him any more to-night, and when he sees how pretty you look I expect he’ll want to sing you that absurdly sentimental song all over again!”
“Oh, Richard, why put such ideas into the girl’s head?” laughed Berengaria, when the door had closed behind her excited flurry of thanks.
“For my romantic young squire to make them sprout, my dear. You don’t want her to mope in the Holy Land, do you?” He came and lifted the thick waves of her hair, letting them run like a silken ribbon over his hands. “Beloved, I’ve never seen you with it loose before. It’s like a lovely sable cloak.”
“What is John like? And who is Arthur?” she asked hurriedly, seeing that they were alone.
“John? Oh, the same as most spoiled youngest sons, I suppose,” answered Richard, jerking a cushion to the floor at her feet and resting his head against her knee. “And young Arthur is my nephew. You’ll like him, Berengaria. His father, Geoffrey, was the one who married Constance of Brittany and got killed in a tournament, you remember? He came between my other two sisters and Johanna, so Arthur is my heir.” He reached up for one of her hands and kissed the small, soft palm. “Until we have sons of our own, witch woman.”
Berengaria leaned her cheek against the top of his head, building homely castles in the fire. “I hope they will all have auburn hair,” she said softly. “And I want a daughter as vital as Johanna. Do you think the English will like me, Richard?”
“How could they help it, sweetheart? Haven’t all my family fallen in love with you? And the young pups of pages and the tough archers and even the King of Jerusalem himself? And isn’t that swine Chalus ready to stab me any dark night?” Richard twisted himself round until his arms were about her waist. In the shifting firelight he seemed as young and eager as the day he first loved her in Navarre. It was as if he had shed the years of ugly fighting against his father and brothers—the months of responsibility and kinghood. “You look like a little silver statue—sitting so up right—on that great bed,” he said unsteadily. His eyes were warm with passion, his lips demanding. “I’ve waited such years—wanting you …”
Passionate Brood Page 17
