The White Cross (49 page)

He brought his daughter with him mounted like a lady on a white Welsh pony – although still child enough to wave excitedly and call my name, before her father frowned her into silence. He had shaved off the beard I’d always so admired, and actually looked better for it. Dressed all in red, as he had been when I first saw him in the fortress bailey, he seemed as he always seemed, in confident control.

The Countess’s guards drew round her, and her little dogs barked wildly as he leant forward to dismount. For months I’d dreaded seeing him. Now after the first glance I made a point of smiling past the father to the child – with both my hands clenched underneath the cloth to stop them shaking.

Sir Hugh uncovered to make some kind of an extravagant salute. ‘My Lady Isabel, I see you are in health.’

(That voice, that mocking voice! ‘Please what? Please spare me your uncouth attention? Or please to use me like a bitch on heat, knowing I’ve been begging for it this twelvemonth?’)

‘Sir Hugh?’ In the act of rinsing her long fingers while a page held back her sleeve, My Lady Isabel acknowledged his obeisance.

‘I bid you welcome Lady to your lands of Sussex.’

‘I hear you Sir, but misdoubt your welcome will be quite so heartfelt when you’ve understood my errand.’

She raised her voice so all should hear what I already knew. ‘I come at the behest of My Lord the Earl of Warenne, as overseer for collection of the ransom for the King’s release. I am in Sussex to demand from all our vassals a fourth part of the income from their holdings – in your case, Sir Hugh, from the land hereabouts which you hold in the right of Lady Constance, and from that within our ward at Haddertun which you uphold still for her son.’

‘Who is invisible, My Lady, and likely to remain so.’

‘Not certainly from what we hear. The roads of Europe throng with returning soldiers, and Sir Garon may very well be of their number.’ The Countess selected a small wooden pick from its receptacle and prepared to use it on her teeth.

‘Meantime his little wife, who should be managing the manor in his absence, sits idle at your side.’

I felt rather than saw My Lady stiffen.

‘As we have ordered for her own protection, Sir,’ she told him coldly. ‘The lady is my ward. A fact I would advise you not to question.’

An awkward pause. But not for long. For in that moment, Hamkin woke to find that he was hungry, and announce the fact – if not in quite the loudest wail that he was capable of voicing – then in something not far off it!

Oh God! I mustn’t move, I thought – or show concern in any way. (He couldn’t know in any case. He might count up the months, as any man might do. He might suspect, but couldn’t know!)

‘Whose is the child?’ The question quietly spoken and precise. (But still he couldn’t know. He surely couldn’t know? Unless someone had told him? Unless he had a spy at Reigate? Unless he’d met with someone at the fortress who had come ahead of us to make it ready?)

‘He’s no concern of yours Sir,’ the Countess snapped.

‘I wonder if that’s true?’

And so he knew! He knew then after all! (And Lady Isabel said HE – had told him that the baby was a boy!)

If I had been a mallard or a lapwing, I would have flapped in front of him to show my broken wing and draw him from the nest. But I was not a bird. My best defence was not to move – to stay exactly where I was between My Lady and her apothecary, Bonfil. All I could do was to keep my head down and my hands clenched in the cloth – my eyes fixed on My Lady’s silver salt dish…

But where was Hod? She’d have the sense, she’d surely have the sense to see what I was doing (wasn’t doing), and just let the baby cry? Hamkin by then had worked himself into a strident state of desperation I knew that it would take me hours to calm.

And then I saw Hugh make his move before the Countess could recall him.

‘Attend to me Sir. Attend I say! You have not been excused.’ Through Hamkin’s cries I heard her jewelled knuckles rap the board.

But I was on my feet by then – and there before him, with Hod appearing out of nowhere at my side.

I stood between them, placed the body he’d abused between the father and the child.

And when my eyes met his, I had to hold them, dared not show him weakness. Could not look away.

I’d known, had always known that he was dangerous – God help me, was excited by the thought, believing that I could control him. Now I knew otherwise, and as I faced Sir Hugh, my thoughts diminished, narrowed to the point of absolute defiance!

With lips clamped shut, his nostrils flared at every breath he took – all the intelligence in his black eyes directed on my face. To search my eyes, as if to gauge my will – to weigh my youth and inexperience against my instinct as a mother.

Every muscle in my body tense, unflinching, hard as iron. I was a tigress with her cub between her paws, knowing that I must oppose the man with all the strength I had.

‘No,’ I thought, ‘this isn’t going to happen. NO!’

CHAPTER TWO

Now I’ve come so far with this, I won’t waste time on the voyage from Joppa to Brindisi, except to recall the pilgrim ship on which we made it – a trim two-master laden to the rails with monks and nuns and friars and priors and priests, who’d made the journey to Jerusalem and now were bound for home. Oh, and maybe to record that when we hit the squall off Crete, the uproar of the pilgrims’ prayers to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost fair bid to drown the howling of the storm.

‘Which makes ye wonder how they’d fare,’ John said, ‘without so firm a faith?’

Soon after we came into port, the pilgrims extracted their heads from storm-basins to find a guide to lead them through the mountains to Salerno, and from thence to Rome to seek the blessings of the Pope. Which came as a relief to us. For having lost all trust in Christian charity, we felt our coin would be the safer if we travelled on our own. Before we sailed, the Paymaster had changed our bezants into silver shillings, two for one, and advised us on our best route north by way of Apulia and the Italian duchies. In Joppa we had sold our armour, all of it – kept only daggers and my sword (which I could not quite bear to part with, although it never left its scabbard). Finding there was nowhere in the port where ponies could be had, I parted with three shillings for a pair of draught mules, which would take a rider but refused to trot.

‘They like to sulk ’tis but the jackass in ’em,’ John Hideman thought. ‘The trick’s to tell ’em that they’re horses, an’ not neddies, every day until they come to see it for theirselves.

‘Works with the ladies too, so’s I’ve heard tell,’ he added with a fair counterfeit of Jos’s famous grin.

We planned to take the awkward beasts as far as possible before the winter overtook us. Then in the spring to cross the alps with them to journey north for home. The land of Apulia, which owed allegiance to the King of Sicily, was broad and flat with stubbled cornfields ready for the plough – and for the first few leagues we rode the mules along its sandy beaches, splashing through the salty shallows.

In every red-tiled fishing village on that coast, the peasants recognised us as crucesignati despite our plain appearance. They swarmed round us, gabbling and smiling, and at another time their welcome might have touched me. But by then I was so wrapped in misery, that it was all that I could do to stop myself from shouting at them angrily to stand away and let us pass. In Ashkelon I’d felt of use so long as I could work. But with its destruction, and nothing to divert me since, I had been overtaken with a sense of my own failure.

As John and I rode north, we saw the coastal plains give way to wooded slopes and olive groves – saw castles perched on ragged hilltops, and passed clusters of round houses with strange shingled cones for roofs. But I stared through them all into a void of lost beliefs. My only loyalty now to John. My only purpose to get him safe home to Haddertun where he belonged.

Yet John himself, who’d faced the horrors I saw only in my nightmares, remained unchanged, as stalwart and dependable as ever. Somewhere about our third or fourth night on the road, when he had picketed the mules, unpacked the potted rose he’d brought from Ashkelon and spread our bed-rolls in the olive grove we’d chosen for our camp, I asked him gloomily how he contrived to be so strong. We spoke in French, and John as ever took his time, staring at a knotted olive trunk and whistling a passage from The Gown of Green
to help him find the words.

‘Rain falls, grass grows, cows crop it, an’ men milk ’em,’ he said at last. ‘’Tis what they’re fashioned for, I reckon. An’ all must take what’s sent.’

He paused to work a piece of loose bark from the trunk and use it as a wedge to level up his pot-plant on the sloping soil. ‘When all’s said I am the same as they, Sir. My work’s to serve ye, now ye’ve lost yer squire. But that comes to me as natural as doing nothin’, mind. I wouldn’t say it makes me strong.’

(What was it Jos said at the siege of Acre? ‘I’m your man, Sir Garry, that’s the shape of it, and ever will be I daresay so long as God’s above the Devil.’)

‘An’ there again, if the task ye’ve set yesself of takin’ back Jerusalem turns out to be the best part of a tidy bit more’n what any man was made to do.’ John looked up briefly as if to read my face. ‘Why then I’d never think that makes ye weak Sir, no more’n you should neither. We none of us know what we’re doin’ mostly – as the man said, when he put his wife out in the dark an’ fucked the bleddy cat!’

It was the first time I had laughed since Acre.

We awoke next morning to the sound of voices, sat up to rub our eyes and play for time – as sleep-hardened men are apt to, when woken suddenly by strangers – and found ourselves confronted by a crowd of smiling peasants. They carried rakes and ladders and led donkeys loaded with stacked baskets, stakes and rolls of hempen sheeting. And by the time that John and I were able to stand decently without our cloaks, they were already busy harvesting their olives – climbing ladders, tying baskets to their waists and spreading out their sheets beneath the trees.

So then what else was there for us to do, a pair who’d bedded in their orchard, but offer them our help?

If anyone had told me that first day, that weeks of picking small black fruit no sweeter than our bitter English sloes would have a good effect on my sour mood, I wouldn’t have believed them. But life springs surprises where it may – and there were more of those to come.

For such as we, who’d laboured to destroy and then rebuild the ports of Outremer, the work itself was not demanding, and John especially was quick to master all its skills. The peasant women stripped the lower branches with long-handled combs. The men set up pine ladders to reach the higher limbs, leaning out with shorter combs to rake the olives down. The children climbed like squirrels high into the treetops, to send down showers of hard black fruit onto the waiting sheets – or foreign heads like mine. For although the folk accepted John as one of them, they treated me as something other – holding ladders for me, ducking shyly when I looked their way, admonishing their youngsters when they used me as a target. And as we dressed alike, and neither spoke their language, I can’t say to this day how they could tell we were not of the same rank.

They were small, wiry people, dark-haired and narrow-framed. The scorching summers of Apulia browned their skin. But the faces of their girls and youths were round and comely, and the groves resounded to their cheerful chatter as they moved from tree to tree. In the main, I stuck to ladder-work to make the most of my long reach. But John was ever where he was most needed by the pickers, pegging out the sheets for them, or bearing their full baskets to the carts – and somehow managing to comprehend their rapid, arbalest-fire speech. At noon we shared their crusty bed and cheese. Then, when the light became too dim for us to find the fruit amongst the leaves, they took us down to stall our mules in an old farmstead built around a yard. To sup on toast soaked in olive oil, and sleep in comfort in a barn that stank of goats.

We stayed a week in that place, picking every day – and then moved on to other groves and other farms along the road they called the ‘strade dell’olio’, to earn our keep amongst the olives. Behind my misery, I think I’d always known that I would have to find the strength from somewhere to continue. And I believe it was the way those peasants lived and worked that finally began to lift the weight of guilt from my bowed shoulders. Whatever tithes or duties they might owe their lord, it had to be the cycle of the seasons – the soil, the sun, the rain, the crops and animals they raised – which gave these folk the sense of fitness I had lost.

Or was there more to it than that?

Did I respond to them because I missed the same thing back in Sussex? It’s true that one young man who drove a donkey cart, reminded me so much of Martin Reeve, I half expected him to pull out a set of bagpipes and deafen everyone in earshot with their frightful pig-squeal music. In another place, a stocky little woman with a bright twinkle in her eye and muscles like a man’s, might well have been Dame Martha – if she’d been two shades lighter and near twice the width. A pair of urchins we found catching frogs in a green pool behind a village press-mill, were like – so very like my John and I had been as boys in the old days of the mudsquelch. In happy days at Haddertun before I trained to be a soldier.

Me as a boy? Me as I could have been if I’d stayed home to live a simple, useful life? Could I have done that? Held the manor, without my time in Lewes Fortress – without my military training?