Crusade (2 page)

Chapter Two

Gregor glared into his steaming pottage, and Georgette stepped carefully around him – it was wise not to disturb Gregor when he was in one of his moods. He could suddenly lash out like a tomcat leaping from a tree branch, grab Georgette’s white-blonde plaits and yank them with all his might, making her shriek with pain. Or he might kick her shins with the tip of the broken old leather boots he’d found at the side of the road outside their village of Illiers.

Georgette grew up under the rough care of her father and the rougher ministrations of her brother. Her mother had died when she was born and her father had flatly refused to give her and her older brother to a childless couple who wanted them as their own. It was not clear whether this unusual choice was due to stubborn pride or fierce love. But it was indisputable that he was only seventeen years old at the time and had neither experience nor aptitude as a nurturing parent.

Once, when Georgette, then a little girl, went crying to her father about Gregor’s wild temper, her father said that the Devil had got into Gregor when his mother died. Georgette’s forehead wrinkled. What could their mother’s death have to do with the Devil entering Gregor? What was the Devil doing inside Gregor? And why didn’t someone get it out? But her father was a man of few words and he had used up all those he was going to employ that day. She was left to ponder the problem alone.

Gregor’s rages were bad enough when he was unprovoked, but they rose to a fever pitch when the other boys of the village taunted him. They plotted ways to awaken his anger from a safe distance, and then laughed at his hoarse roars and wild charges. Only his father and sister used his given name. Adults and children of the village alike called him
Soupe au lait
, because soup with milk in it comes to a boil so quickly. Georgette learned that the only times she was quite safe were those days when Gregor crawled home injured and spent. That meant he had been in a fight that day and had managed to satisfy his rage in the brawl.

One would have expected the toddler to latch on to the first gentle female available to nurture her. But she turned to yet another male, albeit one in skirts: the old priest who lived in a simple hut behind the village church, Father David.

No one remembered when the strange attachment began, but Georgette learned to walk by holding on to the skirt of the priest’s worn habit, learned to talk by babbling the soft murmuring she heard as he recited endless
Ave
s and
Noster
s, and puzzled her little friend Patrice at the village pond by forsaking the making of mud pies to scratch tiny shapes in the sand instead.

‘What are you making, Georgette? Why are you holding the stick that way?’

No woman had ever sung a lullaby to Georgette, but she was soothed by the priest’s gentle voice as he led the way through the psalter, accompanied by the only two boys whose fathers were wealthy enough to pay the priest to tutor them. As she played, she lisped the alphabet like a comforting incantation, as another child her age would sing a nursery rhyme. She could be quiet too, amusing herself for hours by copying again and again with her fingertip the spidery letters the priest had carved at her request on a piece of white birch bark. Neither she nor Father David was surprised when she wrote her first words, but by mutual and silent agreement neither of them ever mentioned to Georgette’s father or brother, or to anyone else in the village, almost all of them illiterate, that she could read and write by the time she was seven.

She learned other skills too. From the village woman who helped care for the priest for a few hours each day, she learned to boil the buttermilk he enjoyed, straining out the solids before pouring it into his mug. She learned to fry eggs with honey so that he could swallow them more easily, and to bake apples until they were soft, sprinkling them with very finely chopped nuts. She learned to cook more hearty fare too and soon took over the cooking in her own home. She watched carefully and learned to spin, weave and sew while Patrice and the other little girls were out playing.

When she turned nine, the woman who had cooked and cleaned for Father David fell ill and died. From then on, the priest solemnly and regularly paid Georgette a coin – which she immediately gave to her father – for making his simple meals, scrubbing the trestle table where he taught and read and wrote, and carefully dusting the concertina folds of parchment in the leather-bound codices that were all the wealth he had retained when he renounced his privileged life.

Father David was very particular about penmanship. As he copied a manuscript, he justified the physical pleasure he took in the flowing ink, as shiny as a raven’s wing, and the curving letters, sinuous and showy, by quoting Saint Bernard: ‘Every word you write is a blow that smites the Devil.’ Georgette nodded her head vigorously as she practised her own letters.

What Georgette’s father thought of the close relationship between his daughter and the most respected man in the village, he never said. He was heard to boast once, when he had drunk too much beer at the festival after the harvest, that his daughter was learning alongside the priest’s two rich pupils. But the incredulous guffaws of his drinking companions sobered him, and he shut his mouth.

The villagers held the priest in high esteem, not for his excellent education as the scholarly youngest son of a noble family, but because, unlike the priests in the surrounding villages, he did not demand a tithe from them. Indeed, it was a very great relief in their hard lives not to have to hand over to the priest a tenth of everything they produced: not only a tenth of the original produce, like wheat, but of the finished food too, like flour; not only every tenth chicken, but every tenth egg too. For that and other deeds, they appreciated and loved him, and gladly brought him little gifts of food – a bowl of white cheese, a rough loaf of bread, the berry liqueur that stained their fingers a rich red.

The priest was growing frail and his eyesight was poor. But he could still see deeply into the eyes of each of the villagers at confession, and he measured out the difficulty of the penance by what he saw there. He never demanded the usual payments for absolution – a fattened duck for the priest’s dinner, a load of firewood for the priest’s stove. No, Father David gave penances that were strange but hard in their own way: a woman who confessed she had sold old eggs as fresh should deliver a basket of eggs anonymously at night to the poorest house in the village; or a villager who had slandered another had to provide an honest apology and a day’s help in the fields. Those passing near the little church heard the thunder of his voice as he detailed for a notorious husband the excruciating pain suffered in the world to come by men who struck women or children, and to the battered family’s incredulous relief the man kept his fists to himself the next few times he staggered home late from the inn.

That particular warning was not prompted by an admission of wrongdoing in the confessional, for the husband had never thought it wrong to discipline his wife, but by the priest’s intimate knowledge of his flock. The same insight led him to warn the blacksmith’s wife of the fate awaiting adulterers on the Day of Judgement, before she had done any more than draw out her laundry time at the village pond when a handsome young neighbour brought his horses to drink.

‘How did he know I was the one who broke the church window?’ Patrice demanded of Georgette. ‘He was visiting sick old Dame Villeneuve when the stone that I kicked cracked his glass, and I told no one. But at confession he kept asking me what other sin weighed on my conscience, what other sin, what other sin, until I broke down and told him, and then all he said was, “Don’t you feel better now, Patrice, my child?”’

This was the same gentle man who had stood little Georgette on her feet when she fell and soothed her minor injuries. And the same man who loved Jesus Christ as tenderly, intimately, dearly as a son, father, brother. Georgette’s faith was watered by the tears the priest wept when he told her of the crucifixion. She cried too, and the old man and the little girl sat together, discussing with grief the Saviour’s suffering in every detail, praying to God to forgive wicked mankind for the pain inflicted on His only son.

Once, Father David caught her hobbling on a stone she had inserted in her little felt shoe, and he made her take it out. He explained firmly that punishing her own body would not remove one part of the pain of our Lord and might even add to it. What father would not feel hurt at the hurt of his own child?

Georgette had heard of other priests placing small pebbles inside their shoes, causing them to hobble and bleed. Some wore rough, scratchy animal-hair shirts that chafed against the skin under their habits. Thus could one’s soul be cleansed and forgiveness earned, they proclaimed. But what her priest said made sense to her and she did not mortify her flesh again.

However, she longed to do something difficult to prove her deep love for God. She sometimes cried as she dusted the sacred statues, including the painted wooden carving of perfect Mother Mary in her sky-blue gown. Father David said that Mother Mary was especially Georgette’s mother because she had no mother of her own. His mother too, he told her, had died in childbirth, and the mother he had chosen to devote himself to was the Mother Church.

Georgette loved her birth father, of course, but not with passionate reverence. Her father on this earth was an impassive man who seemed much older than his young years, his face rarely showing emotion, his devotion to his children and to God unexpressed. Instead, his coin of currency was hard work. That was his declaration of love, that was his religion, although he would have thought such an avowal to be heresy.

He rose before sunrise, urinated out of the door, lit the fire, and set the porridge to cook on the hearth in the middle of their single-room hut. Then he milked the two goats and fed the horse before returning to the house to stir warm frothy goats’ milk into the boiling porridge and sop it up with the hunk of bread Georgette had wrapped in a cloth and set out for him the previous night. On a cold day he might swing a sheepskin cape over the woollen smock and breeches he wore day and night without a change. He shouldered his scythe, spade and pitchfork, harnessed the horse, clicked his tongue, and strode off alongside the animal to cut the wheat field below the lower edge of the village or to sow rye in another field half a mile across the valley floor, or to break up clods in a barley field even more distant. None of the three fields belonged to him. Like the rest of the land that spread as far as the eye could see, the fields were owned by King Philippe Auguste and managed by his bailiffs. As payment for his heavy labour, he was allowed to take the crops from the smallest field for eating or selling.

Soon after their father left for the fields, Gregor rolled off his straw pallet, his mood almost always black in the mornings. He shovelled a double helping of porridge into his mouth in surly silence, washing it down with the lees of the wine from the previous night. He wrapped some dry bread, cured meat or cheese, and a flagon of cider in a piece of cloth, and tied the bundle to his shepherd’s crook. Then he was off to the rich pastures up in the mountains with their two goats, as well as a dozen goats and sheep belonging to neighbours who paid him in kind to shepherd their flocks. He was an accurate shot with a bow and arrow, and most days he brought home a squirrel or hare or maybe even a pheasant for their dinner.

When it was the season to harvest the grain, Gregor joined in with the entire village as they shared these communal tasks, but he was prickly and oversensitive with the other boys, and hardly a day went by without a fight. Some times their father lost patience at the disruptions and dismissed Gregor back to his goatherding with an exasperated kick. No one was sad to see him go, yet it hurt Georgette to see how young he looked as he slouched off alone.

Every morning Georgette threw the slops from their breakfast to the sow, Bess. Bess’s piglets squealed so hysterically whenever Georgette lifted them to estimate their weight that she expected Bess to protest, but Bess took no notice and continued to root in the pottage spilled on the floor. Perhaps, Georgette reflected, she remembered from previous litters that her piglets would disappear as soon as they were large enough to sell in the village market, so she had decided not to love them too much. Georgette didn’t know much about the feelings of mothers, although she pictured her own mother in Heaven almost every night before she feel asleep. She imagined her mother had looked just like the statue of Jesus’s mother in the village church, even down to the blue dress.

There wasn’t any time to imagine in the mornings. Georgette had to draw water from the well in the village square and scrub their single iron pot, then return home to weed around the beans, leeks and onions in their little kitchen garden, bake enough bread for the following few days, and cook a stew for the evening meal. She cleaned the hut, sweeping the trodden-earth floor with a worn straw besom and putting the straw mattresses outside to freshen on sunny days.

Then she hurried down the hill to the priest’s house, where she repeated most of these tasks. Except that Father David had little appetite as he grew older, and the food she made for him lasted more days than it should have. Georgette urged him to eat more, but he said old men had small stomachs, digestion was not easy for him, and he wanted no more than the good bread she baked and a mug of boiled buttermilk. When the villagers brought him food, he thanked the giver kindly but more and more often he sent Georgette to take the provisions to a village family that had been disappointed in the harvest or to a woman still weak from a difficult birth.