Johanna had not moved from her vantage point at the end of the lane. Her indignant pity rose for the fainting girl. She saw a couple of falconers rush forward to drag her from the danger of the grey’s stamping hoofs and lay their limp blue burden among the forget-me-nots and rushes, and was glad when Langton lifted her tenderly against his knee, cupping up some water in his own scholarly hand to revive her. When the other women began crowding round her brother and tearing up their veils for bandages, she felt no urge to help. He had got what he was asking for, making a wild beast show of himself like that! They’d all of them tempers, of course, but her other brothers had never been brutish. By the way some of the servants were crossing themselves, she knew they believed the mysterious arrow to be a judgment straight from God, and without caring much where it came from she felt with disgust that the May morning looked less lovely because John lived in it. “We all tolerate him because he’s amusing,” she told herself. “But Raymond was right. We ought to take him more seriously.” The white-faced girl was carried past her to the house. The miller’s wife came to the door. Johanna watched Langton cross the field to speak to her. “Though Heaven knows,” she thought, “how he can explain the incident!”
The hawking party was remounting and preparing to go home. They had forgotten all about their wagers on John’s gerfalcon but, as usual, he had given them something better to talk about. He rode homewards up the rutty lane, sheepish and sullen, in the midst of them. His left arm was in a sling made from the scented veil of an adoring baroness, and a page was leading his horse. He avoided looking at Johanna. Possibly they both remembered how she had once rated him for torturing a mere dove. Or maybe they both had begun to think the same thing about the arrow.
The woods resounded with shouts as the servants made a great show of beating them for the invisible archer. But once John’s back was turned they soon gave it up. Shere woods were known to be infested with men wanted by the corrupt courts of justice and men who had lost their tongues by John’s orders because they knew too much, and anyone who wore his livery had good reason to avoid them.
“The horrid felon might have killed him!” some of the women had cried. And the polite fallacy had been left unchallenged. But the men knew well enough that a marksman who could pierce a rider’s wrist at three hundred yards could easily have found his heart had he wished.
“Outlaw or no outlaw, the King himself couldn’t have bettered the shot!” a hoary old falconer was saying to his mates as they gathered up the last of the morning’s kill.
They moved off up the lane, and Johanna was left to stare across the deserted mill pond to the rising ground on the other side. Great king beeches rose there like giants from a dense undergrowth of lesser trees. Suddenly she knew as well as John who must have pulled that bow. “Have any of you seen the Cypriot princess lately?” she called casually after her brother’s men, and when they would have turned back she said, “Never mind. I will wait for her.” They thought it natural enough that she, who was so kind even to the grooms and chambermaids, should wait for a foreign visitor. And John, she knew, would be in no hurry to ask for her.
As soon as the men were out of sight she set her horse at the plank bridge that spanned the mill race, taking the path round the pond and plunging into the woods they had just been searching. Almost directly the sound of their voices died away and the grassy hunting rides lay deep and still as if no one had ever been there. Johanna tied her horse to a young oak and pushed her way through the undergrowth until she came to an unexpected clearing. Here were the tallest beeches of all, with primroses nestling at their feet and great shafts of misty sunlight piercing their golden solemnity. At her approach a herd of fallow deer rose on slender legs, gazed at her with brown, reproachful eyes, and bounded off. But one lame doe, after an abortive effort to hobble after them, was left behind. Someone had made a rough splint for her leg with two smoothly whittled twigs and a bit of green cloth. Johanna bent down to look at it and smiled. In the private chase of a prince who trained his hawks to pick out the deer’s eyes, surely only a crazy reformer would bother about binding up their knees. Cursing the encumbrance of green velvet, Johanna picked up her skirt and began running among the trees. Her heavy plaits came unbound, and she could feel the soft wind in her hair. And as she ran she found herself calling, with delicious excitement, “Robin! Robin! Where are you?” just as she used to do on the battlements at home.
He let her find him under one of the beeches, his bow still in his hand. He stood so still that the faded leather of his jerkin and the violet shadows and the smooth grey-green of the trunk seemed one. She remembered feeling how that quality of stillness used to make the restless movements of her family look cheap. But his face was warm with vitality, his eyes a laughing welcome. “It must have been your smile and not the torches that lighted Oxford Castle,” she panted inconsequently, “and all the days of my youth!”
She went straight into his arms, and he held her and kissed the russet of her hair. “It is like the shining beech leaves in autumn!” he teased. But even in that moment he held her as he always had—shielding her from all that was ugly and turbulent in her family, and from his own desires. “My little Johanna!” he said, although the hair he kissed was almost on a level with his lips. “It was a thousand times sweet of you to come!”
She laughed and cried against the faded jerkin and presently drew herself out of his arms to look again at his beloved face. Holding on to his arms, as if at any moment he might vanish, she scrutinised and learned each line of it. “Rough living agrees with you,” she decided. “You’ve changed much less than Richard.”
“It’s a pretty good life, after all,” he said. “And you don’t look a bit like a sophisticated woman who has had two husbands!”
In her joy at finding him Johanna had forgotten both of them. She flushed warmly and withdrew her possessive hands. To keep them safely occupied she began picking the bits of bramble from her dress. “Funny I should wear this to-day…”
“You were always loveliest in velvet,” he assured her. “And I always think of you in green…”
She looked up, well pleased. “And I you,” she said. “But yours is all patched!” There were tears in her eyes for that. She remembered how he had moved becomingly at stately banquets and talked with brilliant men like Becket, and how much her father had thought of him. Johanna’s rare tears moved him so that he shook her in self-defence. “Uncurable tenderheart! My mother loves to mend them,” he laughed. “Remember how she was always going to make Dickon that shirt that was proof against poisoned arrows? And how she made your wedding dress? And how you enslaved Blondel in this one?”
They laughed unsteadily, with the tenderness that wraps the irretrievable past. The thick woods closed them in, setting them apart from all that might come after. And part of Johanna’s heart was crying forlornly, “We are quite alone—and he let me go!” He rolled over a log with his foot, and she sat down on it among the primrose roots. “Were you enslaved too?” she asked. She had to know.
He leaned a shoulder against his tree trunk and lied cheerfully. “Not in the least!” he assured her, for her own good. The lame doe came and rubbed against his knee, and he bent to scratch the top of her head. It was uncanny the way animals never feared him.
Johanna tried to coax her away from him, but she would not come. “Then all I said—and the way I clung to you—that last night in the herb garden, was just—cheap?”
Robin stopped fondling the little dappled beast. “It was the most blessed thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “But, don’t you see, I owed everything to your parents and I knew their plans for you.” He was silent a moment, remembering that awful morning in the King’s workroom when he had been told of them, and how he had said, “Yes, Sir,” like a dolt and blotted the important treaty he was drawing up. “You were only a child,” he went on. “How could I warn you and smash your happiness? But even when we were all happiest together I always knew that our separa
tion must come.”
“And so it was easier for you?”
“I had had a long time in which to school myself,” Robin answered guardedly.
“And—when you heard William was dead?”
“I didn’t—until after you had left Sicily.”
Johanna was quick in her elder brother’s defence. “Richard tried to tell you. He was out searching the woods all night. But he doesn’t know them as you do. And there was a terrible thunderstorm…”
Robin’s eyes were shining. “Did he do that?” he kept saying. He came and stood beside her, one foot on the log. “This morning a fellow we outlaws had befriended told me the King was at Guildford, so when I heard the horn I went down to the edge of the pool and peered through the branches. I was hoping to see him.”
“Poor Robin!”
He met her sympathy with a ready smile. “I didn’t see you either. You weren’t with the others. Only that godless brute, John. My men say they’ve seen him snooping after that girl before. He must pick on just the decent, hard-working sort of family the country needs. You know, I’ve been following that precious brother of yours about ever since Richard left—trying to restrain his men’s cruelty and to undo some of the mischief he does—without letting him get a rope round my neck. And believe me, it was a feast day for me being able to stick an arrow into his pampered flesh!”
“That explains something he said up there in the lane. He feels your influence thwarting him.” Johanna bent to gather some primroses and arranged them consideringly. “And yet he loves England too.”
“He covets it,” corrected Robin.
“But he often does things for the people. He was telling us last night how he had taken the bridge at Godalming away from the Abbots and given it to the town.”
“To annoy the Abbots,” laughed Robin.
“But they’d been charging the poor market people a toll every time they used it.”
“And now the poor market people will probably let it get into disrepair. John loves cheap popularity but he hasn’t much foresight.”
Johanna pinned her posy in the front of her gown, and Robin dismissed him contemptuously from their conversation. “The man’s growing fat,” he remarked. “Another six years and the way he’s lived will show in his face.”
Johanna surveyed his own lean, sinuous limbs with affection. Woman-like, she hoped he got enough to eat. She felt they were both skirting the subject they wanted to talk about, and she preferred to ride full-tilt at things. “Richard has gone up to St. Martyr’s,” she told him.
His slow, affectionate grin was more telling than any show of sentiment. “They tell me he’s grown a beard,” he said.
“It makes him look older—and much sterner. It suits him in a way, I suppose—but Berengaria says she’s lost the young man with the devastating mouth she fell in love with.”
“Why didn’t she come with him? Is it true they quarrelled?”
Johanna nodded sombrely, picking shreds of bark from the birch on which she sat. “Over Isaac Comnenos’s daughter. Richard was fool enough to bring her to England. As a hostage for the Cypriotes’ good behaviour, he says.”
Robin flung himself from her with an angry exclamation and began pacing back and forth across the sward, beating one fist upon the other. Except that he was more graceful, some of his gestures were ridiculously like Richard’s. “You Plantagenets!” he raged. “Must you quarrel with everything you love? Probably he doesn’t care two hoots for the baggage, but it’s to be hoped Berengaria will be big enough to forgive him. If she came and settled down here and raised a family, there’d be some chance of his stopping in England.”
“Why should he?” challenged Johanna resentfully. “Normandy’s more important. And he was Duke of Aquitaine before he was King of England.” Robin, she knew, thought of them all as servants to his precious island. Whereas they, in spite of their father’s precepts, still thought of it as a gift from their great-grandfather—a place to enjoy. That, she supposed, was what Robin meant about the difference between John’s love for it and his own. But what did it all matter when she was with him again and had so much to tell him? She sat there twanging the string of his bow as if it were a harp and enjoying his rare impatience. “Berengaria may be unreasonably jealous,” she told him, “but at least she sticks to the rules herself. When I was in Rome she was sick with anxiety for Richard, but she refused to buy his release by selling herself to the richest man in Europe.”
“Chalus, you mean?”
Johanna looked up quickly, surprised that an outlawed Saxon should even have heard of him. But she hurried on with her tale. “And then, inevitably, she tortured herself, wondering if she had been over-fastidious or mean. You’d like her, Robin.” She went on, covering the foul name he called Chalus. “She simply hates war and makeshift living in tents, and yet look how she nursed Richard through all that heat at Haifa!”
“Heaven bless her!” ejaculated Robin.
“She has far more self-control than we have. She never once complained about the dirt and the discomfort although she herself was far from well at Acre.”
Robin swung round at mention of the place. “God, what wouldn’t I have given to see Richard raise that siege!” he exclaimed. Johanna hadn’t realised what it must have cost him to give up his share in such adventure. He came and sat on the log beside her, and she told him the whole long story of the crusade, what people had said and done, how Richard had laughed and fought and triumphed and been frustrated—making it all live for him as if he had been there. It was the best gift she could give him, since for England’s sake she hadn’t been able to give him herself. He opened his pouch and shared his midday meal with her as he had done many a time beside the Thames, and neither of them noticed how the noonday sun was slipping westward.
“It must have been well nigh unbearable for him, leaving Jerusalem untaken!” he said.
“The thing I regret most was his killing all those prisoners outside Acre. Berengaria begged him not to, but she was too tragic about it. If you’d been there he wouldn’t have done it. And you’d probably have stopped him from quarrelling with Leopold. It was funny at the time, of course. And Blondel and I both felt you’d have known how to keep it—just funny.” Johanna saw it clearly, how Robin had always been the complement of Richard, keeping him at his best. Richard was the more spectacular, but Robin was the stronger. Richard with his head in the clouds, Robin with his feet on the soil…She turned to him impulsively. “My dear, won’t you let me ask Richard if you may come back?”
But Robin was no plaster saint to make the first move. He had been grievously and unjustly hurt. Even now, it was hell to think of them all up at the Castle and he and Hodierna not there. It would be wonderful, of course, to ride back with Johanna now. To take a chance on it. A stab in the back from John’s men-at-arms or the chance of a handgrip from Richard. To walk into the hall he knew so well and warm himself at the fires of friendship, to kiss his beloved white-haired Queen and put his feet under a civilised table again…Silks and velvets and napery, coming and going of well-trained servants, the stimulating talk of travelled men, the laughter of well-born women. What right had any man, in maniac anger, to cut him off from these? Robin shook the bitterness from his mind and pressed Johanna’s pleading hand. “No, no, sweet. Believe me, it’s better as it is. I find there are things I can do—contacts I can make—which were impossible while I lived with you. Perhaps if I believed Richard would really stay…But we both know him so well. The first time he gets another chance at Jerusalem, or Philip casts an eye on a bit of his land…Your mother’s getting too old to take an active part when he goes. There’d be just John and me. I’m not even your father’s bastard, but the people would follow me. And that would mean another civil war.”
Johanna smoothed out a bit of birch bark on her knee. The under side of it was pink and silver like one of Berengaria’s beautiful gowns. “I suppose that would be worse than having us conquer you,” she admitted.
But Robin was never serious for long. “My dear child,” he mocked lazily, “did you conquer us? I rather thought we just absorbed you.”
“Absorbed us?”
Robin moved to a grassy hummock in the sunshine and sat there hugging his knees. “Haven’t we borrowed all your best words and enriched our strain with your haughty blue blood?” he demanded.
“Why do we keep saying ‘we’ and ‘you?’” complained Johanna. “You’re really part of everything, with a Saxon father and mother whose people were half Roman. And then being brought up with us. But you ought to love us best!”
Robin answered her with categorical honesty. “I love your swiftness and your efficiency, and even your splendid anger. Sometimes I envy your arrogance. I want these things as leaven to our Saxon stolidness. But I hate your everlasting quarrelling and warmongering. It doesn’t give us a chance. I want the people of this country to have years of peace so that they can earn a square meal without stealing some over-fed Norman’s deer. I want their fields and their lives to be their own so that they don’t have to go and be butchered in your petty foreign squabbles. I want their children to learn to read. You know, Johanna, it would be exciting to write a book, not in solemn Latin, but in this everyday new language we are making—this English.”
“So that we should come to think the same kind of thoughts?”
“Imagine the result! Courage welded to good-humour, efficiency to patience. It should produce a breed who would seek peace and ensure it—but who’d fight with their last breath to prevent another Hastings.”
It was getting chilly and Johanna stood up, shaking the bark shavings from her lap. “Oh, Robin, you always did want queer, idealistic sort of things!” she said, thinking how utterly different his ambitions were from Richard’s. “Don’t you ever want anything for yourself?”
Passionate Brood Page 30
