The White Cross (6 page)

‘How many more must die, do you think, before we know if we have won or lost and can ourselves retreat?’ the Countess is saying to the Earl. I can just see his profile shouting with the rest, but doubt he’s heard a word she said.

Her face is in the shadow… But, mon Dieu, she’s looking at me!

‘I need hardly tell you that My Lord and Lady are your most powerful allies and protectors.’ (Maman’s latest words of wisdom, just this morning while Hod dressed me.)

‘I know you to be contrary, Elise. But if you’re sensible you’ll take care to oblige them.’

That’s why I’m smiling greenly at My Lady like a perfect gooseberry!

I stared a long time at the other’s body. At least that’s how it felt, while something vicious in me thrilled to see what I had done. I’d taken a man’s life and kept my own, the thing I’d trained for and far easier than I expected. I wished my father could have seen it.

And yet because of you a Christian knight lies dead and excommunicate. His death is on your soul.

A small voice like an argument inside my head, which I ignored. It was my first kill but it wouldn’t be my last.

‘Steel, Defendants! Steel!’ The moment, and that’s all it could have been, was interrupted by Sir Rob de Pierpoint. Thanks to my Jos I was back in the saddle straightway and surrounded by the hiss and clatter of drawn swords, of steel on steel, while riders all across the field vied for honours in the mêlée.

‘Haddertun, á moi!’ Another too-familar voice cut through the clangour, pulling me about to where Sir Hugh leant on the lance he’d used to pierce the hauberk of a squirming combatant and pin him to the turf.

‘I need help here if you’re still with us, boy?’ he shouted, and however much I may have cursed them for it, the rules of tournament obliged me to obey. To leave my bloodstained lance with Jos, to drag my horse around to cover Hugh’s retreat. To wheel about and challenge all who blocked our path. To hew and hack, and turn and turn about in practice of the art of tourney.

My memory of the mêlée is confused. The action spread back from the centre as more captives, one by one, were dragged towards the barriers and lost their status as competitors the moment that they passed the stakes. Squires running for loose mounts danced in and out and round the fringes of affray with the agility of acrobats. Except one boy who misjudged a horse’s stride, to die in anguish, hours later we were told, within the surgeon’s tent.

From my view only two things mattered, scoring and surviving. The sun’s glare was relentless. Light-headed with excitement I fought unthinking through the heat, trusting to an instinct forged from years of schooling in the castle wards. I sweltered in my padded felt and link-mail, basted in my own salt sweat. It filled my gloves, coursed down my face.Once I looked up to see a loose horse leap the double rails and plunge into the crowd. Twice I made the journey past the stakes with captives for the chequer of Warenne. Figures loomed and vanished. Horses farted. Dung was everywhere. The sound of blades and polearms pounded us like waves on shingle.

We laboured to endure until the Priory bell rang Sext and summoned all remaining on the field to take refreshment, free ourselves of helms and mortar caps, gulp lungfuls of fresh air – to part our hauberk flaps to piss while squires fetched bandaging and ran for washing bowls.

‘The odds are with us, men. If we’ve the bowels for it the day is ours,’ Sir Robert told us as we lay on the turf exhausted, too tired even to think.

Our way back to the arena led through the trampled area behind the stakes where captives slumped, attended by bone-setters and nursing brothers from the Priory. Our winded horses no longer pranced with arching necks, but sidled to the line with bleeding mouths and flaring nostrils – all but three who by the Rules of Poitou must be excluded to keep the numbers even for the second charge.

I need one more, must bring another down, was what I thought. But when it came, the gallop and the brunt, my fresh lance shattered on the cantle of the man I’d chosen. Both horses swerved too sharply for attaint. Striking wide, the other’s lance-point scored a bloody groove down Raoul’s flank, and by the time I brought the screaming animal to trust his feet to solid earth, I’d lost my challenger to…

…well naturally it
had
to be of all men on the field, my wretched stepfather, Sir Hugh de Bernay!

It was a crucial moment for a novice, and having lost my man I made things worse by losing my own head. The guilt, the pain I felt for Raoul, my rage at Hugh, all came together in a red, unthinking fury. I needed urgently to feel my sword-blade biting flesh. To see the blood. To kill!

So when the captain of appellants, Wolstan de Bolbec, came in view, a brute as wide as he was high and solid as an ox, I kicked in spurs and charged him blindly. ‘Son of a whore!’ I shouted in the grip of battle madness.

He heard me, waited calmly, chose his time and swung his sword with his weight behind it, catching me off-balance and unshielded. The first blow struck my blade in a bright shower of sparks. I took the second on my helm. Its force through layers of steel, a mortar cap and leather coif was stunning, truly! With sun and moon and all the stars exploding in my brain, I clutched my head and would have fallen. But my saddle bow upheld me for the fatal blow, the coup de grâce.

It would have been, if Hugh de Bernay hadn’t intervened to catch Sir Wolstan in mid-stroke. To save me and to and shame me by unhorsing him with a swift lance-thrust to the temple.

It was to be the last fall of the tourney. Leaderless and heavily outnumbered, the appellants had no option but to concede. Nor was the umpires’ choice of a Champion for our defendants in any kind of doubt from the time the giant Sir Wolstan hit the turf.

Wrong man again. It would be, wouldn’t it!

But no one could deny he looks the part without his helm, now that My Lady’s granted him the accolade and laurel crown – rowelling his spurs to make his stallion paw the air, smiling broadly, and directly at me!

If only my Sir Garon wouldn’t look so… he hardly seems to know which way to turn, poor thing, to hide his disappointment.

‘By my faith, your lord has style as well as courage, Lady Constance,’ the Countess Isabel is saying to the woman at my side. ‘You must be gratified, for it isn’t every knight who’d save the life of one whose sons by right of birth must disinherit his.’

‘My husband and my son are bound by ties of kinship, Madam,’ Lady Constance tells her stiffly.

‘In which case you might do well to give our Champion a son of his own making,’ the Countess remarks, ‘to square the perfect circle of devotion.’

It was not until the fighting stopped that I was able to take stock of all my hurts. My cheek was cut and one eye blacked. A purple bruise spread half across my chest, with others on my arms and legs. The fingers of both hands were swollen. My head would scarcely turn upon my neck, and when it did, I felt as if a red-hot band was clamped around my temples. In short I was a wreck. But that was only part of it. A well fed cur defending a full manger against a herd of starving cattle could scarce have acted worse than I did at the tourney feast next day.

To be the second knight in tournament was something for a youngster, Rob de Pierpoint assured me with a friendly cuff. The thing was bravely done, he said. My Lord of Warenne, all my confrères said the same. I hadn’t failed. My problem was that Hugh de Bernay had succeeded. It was next thing to torture for me to witness his triumph at the feast, and I took refuge in self-pity, drinking steadily to drown my misery in quantities of ale.

The banquet was postponed from midday to mid-afternoon, by which time the great hall of the fortress had been cleansed of old floor-strewings and carpeted with rush. High on its walls hung rows of antlers, old charms to lure the spirits of the deer into the hunters’ paths. The light was poor. Strong-smelling tallow candles lit rows of chattering faces down the tables – except at the Warennes’ high board on the dais, where my Elise and Lady Blanche were placed and where all the candles were of red beeswax set in silver holders. Sewers bearing laden platters scurried from behind the draught-screens. Ewerers brought finger bowls and jugs of wine.

We knights and squires sat down the hall, so tightly jammed together that we knocked each other’s elbows as we ate. On either hand of me were men I’d known for years, Sir Dickon and Sir Mark le Jeune, along with Jos and Fremund and the tourney captives who were bound to us until their ransoms had been paid.

‘See Haddertun, your favourite relative is summoned to receive his trophy from the Bishop. You have to hand it to the man, he’s earned his prize however you mislike him.’ Sir Dickon’s idea of good sport was pouring salt into my wounds.

I wished Hugh joy of it.

‘I’m sure a coloured stone in a brass basket dressed with feathers from a blighted peacock is just exactly what he needs,’ I said bitterly, as through the din of upward of two hundred mouths, through barking dogs and mewing hawks I heard the Earl of Warenne’s laughter at some remark de Bernay made as he took up the bauble – and glumly supposing the joke to be at my expense, reached out to fill my beaker from the nearest jack.

I see him at a crowded table in the lower hall, flushed and dishevelled, positively guzzling beer! He’s proved his courage and I’m proud of it. So why can’t he be too? How silly to feel disappointed when he’s done so well. Why can’t men lose with a good grace, as women have to nine times out of every ten?

I’d like to go to sit beside him, offer him some comfort, but dare say that would only make things worse. Besides, it isn’t often that you have the chance to hear the conversation at high table. Back home in Lancaster we ate in silence, talking only in the gaps between the courses. The silence, Maman said, respected those at lower tables who, unsure of where their next meat might be found, saw eating as an earnest business. Here nothing is in short supply. I’ve loosed my girdle and am already round as a blown sheep!

The Archbishop’s just set down a brimming mazer of red wine to address My Lord the Earl on his left hand.

‘The wine is excellent, My Lord. But now perhaps if you have no objection, I should like to give your doughty champion his award while he’s still moderately sober.’

The old man’s slight with an untidy fringe of grey hair round his tonsure, dressed simply in a woollen cassock none too clean. He speaks French with a gentle drawling accent. (Maman says he comes from Devon.)

‘The Knight of Bernay? You seek to honour him yourself, Your Grace?’

My Lord of Warenne looks surprised. But then he always does, because his right eye’s clouded from some injury whose scar contorts the brow above into a quizzical expression. The other eye’s blood-red from working for the twain. ‘Ah yes, I see the smoke of what you’re at. You mean to catch him off his guard and pin a cross on the poor fellow while he’s kneeling for his prize? Is that the way of it? To sign him up for this croisade you’re all hell bent on, hunting Saracens in Palestine?’

‘No please, “hell bent” is hardly how I would have chosen to express it.’

The old Archbishop’s passing the gold mazer to his host, most carefully to save it dripping on the cloth. ‘But in essentials you are right, My Lord, and surely must agree with the necessity for this croisade.’

‘Necessity?’ Earl Hamelin’s banged down the mazer. (The red wine’s bound to stain.) ‘The only necessity I recognise is loyalty to the Crown. As far as I’m concerned croisades are fools’ errands and ever have been – although I’m not so much a fool myself as to stand in Richard’s way to free the Sepulchre, if that is what he’s set his heart on.’

‘Your Grace, I’m grateful for the honour.’

Sir Hugh de Bernay looks amused, as well he might with a green garland on his head and that preposterous prize! But neatly clad, and lighter on his feet than he has any right to be, considering the way he fought.

He surely must have noticed where I’m sitting?

‘And with My Lord of Warenne’s leave, I’d honour you still further.’ The Archbishop speaks for all to hear, his smile exhibiting as many blackened stumps as teeth. ‘I’d offer you the cross, my son, and God’s own blessing of Salvation, if you will march with us to free Jerusalem and slay its infidel invaders.’

‘Forgive me, Your Grace, but I cannot recall Our Lord instructing us to slay our enemies. I thought He held another view entirely?’

Sir Hugh’s smile whiter, much!

‘Christ’s words were not intended for the enemies of God, my son,’ the Archbishop assures him. ‘The heathen of this world can never be deserving of forgiveness. So tell me, will you ride with us to do His work in Outremer – in Christendom-beyond-the-sea?’

‘To leave my wife and daughter unprotected?’

‘The property and families of those embarking on croisade will be vouchsafed the protection of the Church. The late Pope Gregory’s encyclical confirms it.’

‘Your Grace, I have already said I’m grateful for the honour.’

With his free hand Sir Hugh is stroking his long nose. ‘And by the faith I’d go and gladly, if the Church could find a substitute to supervise my wife’s estates and guard My Lord of Warenne’s interest here in Sussex.’

‘Hah!’ snorts the Earl nudging the old archbishop’s elbow. ‘Damn me, he’s scored a point there, Baldwin! Funds are very well, and I for one will pledge my nephew all he needs. I’ll even help him sell off land and titles in the cause if he’s a mind to do it. But England isn’t going to run itself while he’s away.’