Hope and the Knight of the Black Lion

by Mary C. Findley

  Soon enough, though, Baron Colchester and Lady Ada came down to receive the Godwins and their train. A crisis of burnt pastries kept me in the kitchen until it was time to set food on the table. I had scarce time to change clothes and slip into my place beside Richard and across from my mother, my face burning from the heat of the ovens and my cropped hair standing straight out in spite of all my maid had tried to do to contain it.

  Richard shot me one look, amused and chiding and very loving all at once and I felt now he knew something I did not. Lord and Lady Godwin sat with us, of course, and I was surprised to see that Sadaquah and Tahira filled out the company. When we dined as a family, of course, Sadaquah sat with us. He had given up some of his Muslim restrictions as he became more at ease with us but I did not know what the custom was at the Godwin house. I looked around.

  “I thought that the new earl of Chelmsford was to dine with us also,” I whispered. “Are we not to wait for him?”

  “Nay, why should we wait?” Richard rumbled. “He is here. Be still. My father will pray if you give him leave.”

  I could not attend while my uncle spoke the grace. The new earl of Chelmsford here? I shot a furtive glance at Sadaquah and he was perfectly inscrutable, head bowed, eyes closed. Tahira kept her eyes cast down and I realized I had better stop trying to learn anything during the prayer. Richard slipped his hand over mine and squeezed it.

  When we sat down, Lord Godwin spoke. “This hath been a time of miracles,” he said fervently. “We thought not to see the young lord of this manor alive again.” Richard elbowed me and mouthed the word “young” with a grin. I glared at him.

  “But we are doubly blessed, because my lady and I have heard news of a relative of hers who was lost in the Holy Land more than twenty years agone. We thought not to ever know of his fate, and yet God has brought us word of her younger brother Henry, who went to be a Crusader long before Lord Richard made his sally. We learned that he married a wife and died there, but left a son to carry on his name.

  “This son has come home to us, nephew to my beloved wife, to gladden her heart with a remembrance of her lost brother. His holdings passed to another when we thought there was none left to carry on the name, but we are glad to have the earldom of Chelmsford to bestow upon him. And we are right glad that he is a warrior and a man of great courage and heart, and one who loves Christ and will do all that is right for the place. Here may I present, to you first, who have found him and brought him to us, Henry Sayre, Earl of Chelmsford.”

  He stood and Sadaquah, shy and ill at ease, stood with him. I scarce had wit to clap with the rest of those at the tables. We all rose to our feet, still clapping, and Sadaquah blushed scarlet.

  “The young earl hath made us glad again by choosing as his lady my dear wife’s lady-in-waiting, Tahira,” Lord Godwin smiled. “We are loathe to lose her, but right glad to see her so well-placed. God give you His richest blessing, young earl. Never was my heart so glad to give away a piece of ground.”

  I could not eat a thing, though my hands had prepared most of the meal and I knew it was a credit to the house. I kept trying to catch Tahira’s eye but she would never look my way. Of course, Lady Godwin kept plying Sadaquah with questions about his father and bringing Tahira into the conversation with tearful reminisces. Richard saw how restless I was and brushed his fingers against my flushed cheek.

  “Peace, my lady,” he whispered. “There will be time and more for a chat with the Lady Tahira. She goes not far away, you know.”

  At last the meal ended and the ladies withdrew. I grabbed Tahira by both hands and pulled her into a window-seat in the drawing room. “Tell me quickly,” I urged. “Tell me all. I shall die if I do not hear it at once.”

  Tahira blushed and smiled. “He came a-riding up to the gates as if he were back in his Muslim band, sweeping down upon the Christians,” she said. “The guards would not let him enter at first, he was so wild. But I saw him from the window and I begged my lady to grant him entrance. I hoped … I thought I knew his errand.

  “He came straight up to my lady’s chamber, all a-swirl and so bright of eye and handsome, and knelt before her, not even giving me a look. He confessed that he had found Christ, and asked straightaway if he might have her permission to seek my hand. My lady was astonished. She looked at me, but then her eye went back to him. I could not tell what she meant by the look she gave him. She had been glad, but her face was very strange now.

  “‘Lad, take off thy headgear, please,’ she bade him. Sadaquah and I were both startled, but he obeyed her at once, and she looked long upon him and then burst into weeping. ‘I do not believe in spirits,’ she said when I had tended her and she came to herself again. ‘But I see the face of my dead brother when I look at this young man. How can it be possible?’

  “Then Sadaquah confessed to her that his father was an Englishman named Sayre, and she wept anew. Sadaquah had known nothing of his father beyond that he was English and the family name, but he had kept by him as a child a bit of gold chain and a seal, until he and his mother had been forced to trade it for food. He sketched it for her and she showed a gold fob she wore that was her family’s crest. They were exactly alike. She cried for her husband to join us and made known to him that Sadaquah was her brother’s son.

  “Lord Godwin was by no means so ready to take this at face value,” Tahira said, shivering a little. “He feared my lady’s fancy might lead her to hastily conclude something that might not be true. He took Sadaquah away and questioned him a long time, and in the end we packed up and hurried off to my lady’s family home, to know more particularly the circumstances under which her brother had disappeared from their ken. He did not allow us to see Sadaquah again for many days and I feared what might happen. I never doubted Lord Godwin’s goodness, but to falsely claim to be the son of an English lord is a grave offense and since it was his own wife’s family he wanted to be very sure.”

  “But Tahira, what of you?” I cried. “There was no opportunity for Sadaquah to renew his request for your hand in all that time?”

  “I tried to see the thing as Lord Godwin did, my lady,” Tahira replied. “But I, selfishly, could only think that our courtship had been brief indeed, and I had no idea whether I would be allowed to accept his offer. If he were a lord’s son indeed I had no hope that he would be able to wed me. And if he were not, would my lady be willing to let me go? She still ails at times and needs someone to tend her. It was a great muddle, lady. I could not see it coming out right.”

  “But it did,” I smiled.

  “Aye, my lady. Sadaquah came to me and said, ‘I should never have shown the lady my face,’ with a great deal of rue. ‘Now I must learn how to put on English clothes and be a lord. But I have told them I will not do it if I may not have you, and they have said it is for you to say. You must help me. I will never know what to do. My brother never thought to school me in court manners, and you have lived with them and learned their ways. You will be an English lady, and rich, I will love you always. Say you will be my lady.’ And I could not but say yes. We were married by a good priest Lord Godwin brought to the house the same day.”

  “Sadaquah said all that? And you are married already?” I laughed out loud, and my mother and Lady Godwin looked over at us in surprise. I kissed Tahira on the cheek. “We shall be neighbors, and sisters, just as Richard and Sadaquah are brothers.”

  Later we joined the men. Richard was whispering something as he stood a foot or two away from Sadaquah and whatever it was, it was making the young Arab pale with anger. I drew near and heard Richard repeating, “Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry.”

  “Hassib! Can you not be still?” Sadaquah hissed. “I have not given up my scimitar yet.” I grabbed Richard’s hand and pulled him away for a talk.

  “It cannot have been so easy to get the earldom for Sadaquah,” I exclaimed.

  Richard shook his head. “Godwin’s wife’s family was not happy to be forced to confess they had an Arab branch in
the family tree. They had little choice but to grant his right to bear the name of Sayre after Lord Godwin finished his digging. He found out about a letter Henry Sayre the elder had sent to England to his mother, proclaiming the marriage and sending the confirmation of the priest who had performed it. The letter seems to have arrived after Sayre’s mother died, and was ‘mislaid’ among her effects. None would admit doing it deliberately but once Godwin forced them to disclose it he was satisfied that Sadaquah had a true claim. They fair threatened war at Godwin’s suggestion that Sadaquah had a right to come into their whole estate. He is in line to do it, but in truth Lady Godwin’s elder brother has sons aplenty and it is not likely Sadaquah would ever step into that holding. There was a smaller bit of land that belonged to Sadaquah’s father but it passed on to a cousin and, again, there was so much ill-will in the family that Lord Godwin was loath to place Sadaquah in the middle of such an unloving family.”

  Richard stopped and looked searchingly at me. “What is it?” I demanded.

  “Lord Godwin took me aside when they first arrived here today and said there are no heirs at all to the earl of Chelmsford’s estate, and that he had persuaded the king to offer it to me. Would you have liked to be wife to an earl, my lady?”

  “No!” I exclaimed. “I want to stay here always, at Colchester.”

  “I hoped it would be so, for I said him nay without even asking your leave,” Richard said with a smile. “And so he told me he had known where my heart was all along, and had only asked because he wanted to honor me. Then he said he had got the king’s approval to give it to Sadaquah – oh, excuse me, Henry – “

  He seemed to relish saying the name, and I knew that Sadaquah must hate it. “–If I refused. It is a good piece of ground. And I am close by, to see that none take the trouble to make sport of his Arab mother or his Arab wife.”

  Sadaquah and Tahira came over to us at that moment. Richard made a sweeping, courtly bow. “Your service, my lord earl,” he said with a straight face. “You honor us by your notice. You are over me, now. You know that, do you not?”

  Sadaquah’s eyes widened. “Abadane -- Never,” he said in a whisper.

  “It is so, all the same,” Richard said. “We are your obedient servants, my father and I both.”

  “I will not take it, then,” Sadaquah said, pale and trembling. “It cannot be, that my brother should bow to me.”

  “Take it and welcome,” Richard laughed. “Oh, Sadaquah, we are brothers and shall treat each other however we like. If the king himself comes he shall have to gape and stare that there is no ceremony in either of our houses.” He clapped Sadaquah on the back and almost knocked him off his feet. “Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry,” he whispered in Sadaquah’s ear. “I shall like seeing you in hose and garters.”

  Sadaquah rasped out something in Arabic. I thought I recognized Richard’s name in it. Richard laughed. “What did he say?” I demanded.

  “He said my name sounds worse than his, and I should not be so quick to mock him. He demonstrated how they sound if you say them with an Arabic inflection, and he is right. Mine is worse. Besides, we cannot give up Sadaquah altogether. It really means righteousness, and now at last he can bear it truly.”

  “I shall always think of you as Sir Chris, the knight of the black lion, and he as Sadaquah,” I said, burying my face in the folds of his tunic. “Richard and Henry are just names.”

  “They are names that have got us lands and homes,” Richard chided. “Sir Chris and Sadaquah had nothing but a pair of horses and a bit of bedding between them. Richard Colchester and Henry Sayre can do much more good than those vagabonds could.”

  “As long as you have the power of God upon you, my lord, you will never want the power to do good,” Tahira said. “And His power is very great in you. Very great.”

  “Well, God has done great things all around me,” Richard said uneasily. “I looked back at that diary of mine, and I shuddered to see that arrogant fellow who began it. How a man stumbles about when he does not know God. I was wrong in everything I did until I could do nothing for myself. After I was made a slave, then it was that I truly began to pray. I prayed that God would set us all free, and He said, ‘Sing my praise.’ I prayed that He would let these tortured souls have some peace and He said, ‘Speak My Word.’ And I did, and He did.

  “Rasoul told us when he found us again that when he returned from taking Tahira to the coast the slave camp at the salt mine was gone. And the desert people told him that it had not just been moved. The Frenchman had gone off, and the Arabs had released their prisoners and disappeared. I cannot say that God made all things better for those sufferers – No doubt some died, or were crippled as I was, but God ended the torture, and I believe it was to show me that prayer has great power. That is a lesson I have not forgotten.”

  He softly began to sing, in that marvelous voice of his, “‘Non nobis, Domine, Domine, non nobis, Domine Sed nomini, sed nomini, tuo da gloriam. Not to us, O Lord, not to us, But to Your Name give glory.’“

  “So you prayed hard for me these two weeks gone,” Sadaquah smiled. Richard nodded. “I knew it. And you see how it came out? You prayed too hard. I shall never be comfortable again.”

  “Of course you will,” laughed Richard. “We shall tramp and you can wear your Arab wraps. Oh, Sadaquah, in all my dreams I did not think of this end. I really thought you would leave me and go back to Egypt that day we quarreled about Hope.”

  “Aye, my brother, and remember that God gave you something else that you could not see you needed,” Sadaquah said. “Something you said you did not even want, though you did ask for it many times.”

  “What riddles are these?” Richard said. “Say it in Arabic, and mayhap I will understand.”

  “Almost every day you would say, ‘Taffadhal raja,’ and I would say, ‘Ma indi raja.’“ Richard still looked puzzled. Sadaquah spluttered with impatience. “You see? It must be English, because you do not think of it when you hear it in the Arabic. Lady Hope knows what I mean.”

  “What?” I demanded.

  Sadaquah laughed at my frustration. “It is what we talked of, lady,” he said. “I told you my brother needed it more than anything else in all his troubles. He needed raja. It means hope. And he got you.”

  Notes for the Reader

  I have tried to be accurate in my portrayal both of Arabic and European cultures of the time periods as well as the Romanist and Muslim faiths. My intention is not to offend but to condemn the bad and praise the good in man’s faith in general and to present the truth of the Scriptures. It is not my purpose to portray either culture or religion as better or worse than it was. If there are errors in my presentation of culture, language or religion the fault is my own.

  Colchester, Chelmsford and the other places named in the story are real locations, as is the castle at Colchester, built by the Normans over ancient Roman ruins but largely unoccupied except for being sometimes used as a defensive refuge or a prison. Cloyes and the other family names are also authentic to the area. The characters themselves are fictitious, of course, and are not intended to resemble any actual persons with the following exception.

  Hugo Brun de March is an actual person according to historical documents (see note below on Damietta/ Doumiât) but the “career” I have given him after the battle at Damietta is fictional since he is reported to have died there.

  The Latin Scriptures are taken from the Latin Vulgate, the Clement revision. English translations of some parts of the Scriptures did exist at this time but apparently none had been made which are known for hundreds of years and the Old and Middle English spoken and written at those earlier times would not be decipherable by most people. For the sake of clarity people in the story speak mostly modern English and I have made my own Scripture translations based on my knowledge of Latin and good English translations.

  Louis IX was king of France from 1226-1270. The crusade Richard joined was Louis IX’s first, known as the 7th crusade.
The stated purpose of all the Crusades was to free the Holy Land, including Jerusalem and the “holy sepulchre,” or what was believed to be the burial place of Christ, from Muslim control.

  The physical strength and fighting ability of the European Crusaders was noted in many contemporary records. Schaff’s History of the Christian Church recounts the story of Godfrey of Bouillon, a French knight and “moral hero” of the First Crusade. “With one blow of his sword he clove asunder a horseman from head to saddle.”

  Two composers and their crusader songs are mentioned in the diary section of the book. According to Gary Higginson, Thibaul de Champagne was king of Navarre and lived from 1201-1253. Conon de Bethune lived from c.1150-1224. The songs were written in French originally and are translated in Higginson’s review of a disc of Crusader songs from Classical Music on the Web. Near the end of the book the Non Nobis is sung. This is a song of the Knights Templar in the first crusade. The Latin is Psalm 113:9 in the Latin Vulgate and the English is Psalm 115:1 in the King James Bible. The translation is in the text of the story.

  The attempt to kill the Christian knight recorded in the diary is based on a reportedly historical incident. A medieval French prisoner was executed for treason by this method of “dragging apart by horses.” He was said to be unusually strong and lived for five hours under this torture. I read this in a book on the history of torture more than twenty years ago but have since been unable to confirm it in any other source.

  The Egyptian city referred to by Christians in the story as Damietta (spelled various ways) is called Doumiât (also spelled various ways) in Arabic. Both names are used in the story depending on the point of view of the speaker, but refer to the same city. Damietta was a strategically important city in several of the Crusades, because control of it meant control of the Nile. The battle the diary writer and others refer to actually took place and a French knight named Hugo Brun de March did fight and die there under some suspicion. In the first crusade of Louis IX troops departed from Cyprus for Alexandria in an armada of 1650 vessels, encountered a violent storm, and were blown off course. They attacked Damietta instead of Alexandria and defeated the city April 2, 1249, in spite of the fact that Muslim leaders from Cairo, Babylon and Alexandria sent reinforcements. This information comes from a letter written by “Guy, a knight,” in 1249 to B. of Chartres concerning the battle for Damietta during Louis IX’s first crusade.