The Passionate Brood
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Authors: Margaret Campbell Barnes
Copyright © 1944, 1972, 2010 by Margaret Campbell Barnes
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Cover design by Cathleen Elliott/Fly Leaf Design
Cover images © Queen Eleanor, 1858 (oil on canvas), Sandys, Anthony Frederick Augustus (1829-1904)/© National Museum Wales/The Bridgeman Art Library International
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published in 1944 by Macdonald & Co. Ltd. as
Like Us They Lived
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Margaret Campbell.
The passionate brood : a novel of Richard the Lionheart and the man who became Robin Hood / by Margaret Campbell Barnes.
p. cm.
1. Richard I, King of England, 1157-1199--Fiction. 2. Robin Hood (Legendary character)--Fiction. 3. Great Britain--History--Richard I, 1189-1199--Fiction. I. Title.
PR6003.A72P37 2010
823’.912--dc22
2009051070
To the memory of my elder son
Lieut. Michael Campbell Barnes
Royal Armoured Corps
In writing this story of the young Plantagenets I have used modern dialogue, with the result that their fooling, their quarrelling, and their love-making sound much like those of any other family. For this I make no apology. Since they must have spoken in a Norman tongue quite incomprehensible to us, it seemed more sensible to translate their imaginary conversations into twentieth century English rather than into some pseudo-Elizabethan jargon—though trying, of course, to keep their thoughts within the limitations of their times.
Through their deeds and reactions and affections it is possible to come to know these twelfth century people; but few of their actual sayings have come down to us. When writing a novel about Tudor or Stuart characters there is usually a wealth of letters, contemporary memoirs, and authenticated remarks which can be woven into the narrative; but, apart from a
chanson
or two, the only well known words of Richard Cœur de Lion are those unfortunate ones used when he was in the throes of collecting money for his Crusade—“I would sell London if only I could find a buyer!”
Yarmouth, Isle of Wight
Oxford
Blondel de Cahaignes was fifteen and homesick. It was four days since he had parted from his parents, and the life he had shared with them in their unpretentious manor seemed like a lost world. Of course, he had wanted to come to Oxford to serve in the royal household, and the journey up from Sussex had been more exciting than all the rest of his life put together. He had slept a night in London and ridden over the new wooden bridge across the Thames and seen the Conqueror’s Tower and Edward the Confessor’s Abbey at Westminster. But as the gentle hills which had sheltered his childhood gave place to flat and unfamiliar river country he had begun to realise how much his future happiness depended upon the kind of man whom he was to serve as page. And this Richard Plantagenet had been abroad so much in his duchy of Aquitaine that no one seemed to know much about him, except that he was tall and ruddy and turbulent like the rest of Henry the Second’s sons.
It had been dark when Blondel arrived at Oxford Castle, and he had been packed off to bed without ceremony in the Constable’s room over the gatehouse. And now the old farm servant who had accompanied him had gone back to his pigs and his plough, and the last link with the rural manor of Horsted de Cahaignes was broken. Blondel had waked to find the whole castle astir and had dressed hurriedly, wondering if his new master had already asked for him. But the Constable only laughed. “Duke Richard and his foster brother were off to Banbury fair two hours ago,” he said. “And what’s more they’ve taken the whole pack of clamouring pages with them, so it looks as if you’ll have to lay the King’s table.”
“The wild way things go on here, it’s a good thing the Queen
has
come home again!” added the Constable’s wife, coaxing the boy to eat some breakfast.
Blondel knew there was scandal in the royal household; but he knew it only with the uncomfortable, unacknowledged awareness of youth. So he made no answer but stood by the windlass that lowered the great portcullis, staring out enviously at a dusty road which he imagined might lead to Banbury. How much more fun to go to a fair in good company, he thought, than to begin one’s new duties all alone! But, being a conscientious lad, he lingered for no more than a few seconds to view the enchanting picture framed in each sunlit arrow-slit as he descended the dark spiral of the stairs.
As he pulled aside the leather curtain at the end of the hall his heart beat hard against the velvet of his fine new coat. In his inexperience he expected to find the King and Queen of England sitting there with some of their family grouped about them, just as everybody sat and talked and worked in the hall at home. But the great hall of Oxford Castle was deserted save for half a dozen hounds stretched about the central hearth and the servants who were strewing fresh rushes on the floor and setting up trestles for the midday meal. Blondel did not yet know of the Tower room where the young Plantagenets really lived, and he was too unsophisticated to take it for granted that at this hour of the morning the King was usually with his mistress at Woodstock.
The hall seemed long as a cathedral to a country boy walking the length of it under the servants’ curious gaze. He was overawed by the tall torch sconces and banners and tapestries, and when he reached the King’s table at the far end he stood rather desolately regarding a pile of freshly laundered napkins, stacks of plates, a large finger bowl, and a great gold salt cellar.
He was still wondering what to do with them when a heavy door banged somewhere up in the gallery that ran round the hall and two girls came out of one of the small rooms built in the thickness of the second storey wall. One of them was golden and the other dark. Seeing a stranger in the hall they stopped on their way to the turret stair, and in his embarrassment Blondel seized the nearest pile of plates and began doling them out along the table. The girls leaned over the edge of the gallery to watch him and the dark one laughed contemptuously. “Just look at that fool of a page putting a wooden platter for Richard!” she said carelessly, so that he could hear. “We shouldn’t tolerate such service in France!”
“Well, thank goodness, this is England!” countered the other one. “And, anyhow, he is new.” There was something gallant and arresting about her clear voice and, sensing Blondel’s discomfiture, she immediately included him in the conversation by calling down to him pleasantly, “You’re my brother’s new page, aren’t you? What is your name?”
Although no more than a year or two his senior, she seemed to him quite grown-up. The thick plaits hanging like red-gold ropes on either side of her slender breasts confirmed his guess that she must be the popular Johanna Plantagenet, who rode and swam and hunted almost as well as her brothers. Blondel held his head high and answered her with grave courtesy; but his sensitive face, framed in a formal straight-cut bob of fair hair, was still hot with humiliation.
“It must be horrible having to leave home and begin life all over again among strangers!” she said. And because her lively interest in people killed formality and the haughty, dark girl had shrugged herself away up the turret stairs, Blondel found himself asking this Plantagenet princess which plates he ought to have used.
Instead of calling to one of the servants to instruct him she came down into the hall herself, attracted by his ingenuous smile. “One of the other boys should have stayed behind to show you!” she exclaimed indignantly. And—princess or no princess—she tucked up her long green velvet sleeves and herself showed him how to lay the family table. “Those wooden platters are for the people at the trestles—squires and bailiffs and shire reeves and so on,” she explained. “The servants will see to them. Put pewter for the family, always. Unless someone special comes, and then we eat off the gold. But we do not have many banquets since poor Archbishop à Becket’s death.” She picked up a long rye loaf and with quick, capable fingers showed him how to roll a piece of bread in a napkin for each person.
“I was wondering what to do with all those napkins,” he confessed. “We do not use many at home.”
The youngest daughter of Henry of Anjou and Eleanor of Aquitaine was too great a personage to make him feel small. “Then your sisters must be very lucky people!” she laughed. “We have to embroider the tiresome things during the long winter evenings. Now put a knife at the left of Duke Richard’s plate in case he wants to divide his meat. You will like working for him, Blondel.”
“I’ll do anything—anything…It’s just this waiting at table…” muttered the boy, without looking up. When one’s heart is an aching tenderness for home, kind words are difficult to bear without tears.
“Oh, it’s quite simple really,” she assured him. “The servants will bring all the dishes to that door. All you have to be careful about is not to slop water over people’s feet when you hold the finger bowl for them as they go out. My eldest brother’s page ruined a new pair of shoes for me only yesterday.”
“At least I shan’t do that,” vowed Blondel, with a smile. “I often wait on my father’s guests at home. But then he is only a knight. Here at court, where every other person is a prince or a duke, I am afraid of serving the wrong one first.”
“Well, the King sits here—when he is at home,” said Johanna sliding into her father’s great carved chair at the middle of the table. Henry the Second was a broad man, and she did not nearly fill it; but she and the jester were the only people who dared sit there at all. She often did so to annoy her young brother, John, or to scandalise, the stolid Saxon thanes, taking care to vacate it the moment she heard her father’s voice rapping out orders on the stairs. But to Richard’s new page she looked wonderful enough to sit on the throne at Westminster. He stood at gaze across the long oak table while she stretched an arm this way and that, introducing him to the imaginary company of her relatives.
“The Queen here on his left, of course. And my three brothers in order of age. Henry, Duke of Normandy, on the right. Remember to bow to him, Blondel—he is almost as important as the King. Then your own duke, Richard of Aquitaine, there. And Prince John at the end. Robin and I sit where we like. You will see a lot of Robin. He is your master’s foster-brother, and when Richard is in England they are inseparable.”
“I’ve already
heard
a lot of him,” volunteered Blondel. “My father’s labourers say he is going to make them freemen with fields of their own.”
Although she had no particular interest in unwashed serfs, Johanna looked unaccountably pleased. “So they talk about him right down in Sussex, do they?” she said, her fingers drumming abstractedly on the carved lions that formed the chair arms. Her mouth was smiling and her green eyes wide with some dream of her own from which, presently, she pulled herself back to her present good deed. “Prince John is about your age,” she continued briskly. “You’ll have plenty of fun with him.”
“I believe I must have seen him while I was dressing,” recalled Blondel, to whom the bleak events of exile were beginning to assume a more homely guise. “He was down in the bailey imitating a fat monk who had just fallen off his mule.”
“I’m afraid the fat monk was his tutor,” explained Johanna, “and he fell off because John had been poking chestnuts under his saddle.” She spoke with the full severity of one who had only recently given up abetting him in such pursuits.
“And who was that other lady? The one who called me a fool?” Blondel’s reminiscent laughter had turned to a scowl. “Is she your sister, Madam?”
“God forbid! She is Princess Ann of France. Both my sisters are married and live abroad, but Ann Capet has lived with us since she was quite small because it has been arranged that she shall marry my brother Richard. So she always sits next to him—here.” Johanna Plantagenet flounced out of her exalted seat to jab an explanatory fork into Ann’s bread; and the inelegant force with which she did so suggested to his quick intelligence that she coveted the place for herself and met with a sharp reprimand from someone behind them.
Blondel turned quickly to find an elderly woman bustling into the hall with some expensive-looking white material trailing from her arm. The pleasant, work-lined face was creased with anxiety. “It’s the only fork in the Castle, child!” she expostulated. “And God only knows what that finicking French Madam will say if it’s broken!”
Johanna withdrew the rare implement more gently, and the three of them examined a bent prong with consternation. Louis of France had sent it specially for his daughter, and she always used it at meals—an affected foreign fashion against which the younger Plantagenets frequently sharpened their ribald wit.
“I could take it down to the armoury and get it straightened out before she comes back,” Blondel offered, with the resourcefulness which was to serve them so well.
Johanna regarded him with gratitude. “This is Blondel de Cahaignes, Richard’s new page, Hodierna,” she said.
The woman looked him up and down with shrewd, bright eyes that seemed to be assessing something less apparent than his good breeding and good looks. “Do you know anything about sick nursing?” she asked surprisingly.
“Why, no—” began the boy. He had always supposed that to be work for women and monks.
Hodierna jingled the iron keys that hung against her dark woollen gown. “Then I must show you how to mix herbs and make a soothing posset.”
His young dignity was up in arms immediately. “I hardly suppose my duties will include…”
But although she looked like some sort of upper servant, she caught him up sharply. “Your duties are more important than you realise, young man. You will have to learn to do a great many more things than these other idle popinjays who expect to become useful squires by holding a hawk or strumming a lute. Those Saracens are cunning dogs.”
Blondel began to laugh. “But I don’t suppose I shall have the luck to go crusading—at any rate for years and years!”
“The Duke of Aquitaine is sure to go,” said the woman with finality. She gathered up her costly material, and Johanna slipped an arm round her ample waist. “Hodierna is your master’s foster-mother,” she explained laughingly, “and if I know anything about her she will hold you responsible for his least little finger until the day of his death!”
The two of them went upstairs together, the young Princess protesting that she had done nothing but try on new dresses since her mother’s return. And before going down to the armoury Blondel waited, fork in hand, for another glimpse of her where a turn of the turret stair opened to the gallery above. He was, of course, her slave for life.