The White Cross (8 page)
‘An interesting proposition,’ Hugh considered. ‘His Grace of Canterbury preaches salvation, demands the universe of all we have of wealth and strength and manly vigour for the recovery of an empty tomb – asks nothing less of us than life itself. And offers what? The promise of eternal life? A thing we cannot see or feel or put to proof and hope in any case to gain by true repentance on our deathbeds? My Lord Archbishop strikes a narrow sort of bargain, don’t you think?’
‘No, since you ask I don’t,’ I told him mulishly. Yes, looking back quite like a mule.
‘You simply don’t think, boy, let’s leave it there.’ There was amusement in my stepfather’s dark face. A trace of pity too maybe, if I’d the wit to see it?
‘That dent de Bolbec gave you must have done more damage than I imagined. But even so, a sore head is no reason to embark on such a crazy venture.’
‘You’re right, it’s not the reason,’ I said hotly. ‘There’s such a thing as faith Sir after all. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’
‘Ah faith, blind faith the triumph of emotion over sense.’ Hugh gave the laugh that always made me want to hit him, take a running kick at him and knock him sideways!
‘Now on my soul whatever would we do,’ he asked, ‘where could we hope to find ourselves without blind faith to guide us?’ He hated, he went on to add, to introduce a boring note of caution. But did I realise that my chances of returning from the enterprise were less than even? Had I thought at all where I was like to be six months hence?
‘Shipwrecked, my poor Garon, and at the bottom of the Grecian Sea? Or lying on some desert battlefield the other side of nowhere with your head between your feet?’ He jerked a forefinger across his throat and smiled unpleasantly.
‘What then of faith, when even God laughs at the vanity of your pretensions? Where then the fine ideals that bat about in that thick skull of yours – when fish swim though its empty chambers and worms make porrays of your brains? Listen boy, what you need now’s a woman not a war.’
And of course I should have listened.
Is it time itself, or what’s happened in the time since then that’s changed me? I hardly need to ask. I should have seen then what I now see clearly. I should have seen that Hugh was serious for once. I should have known that I misjudged him. But I didn’t.
In his attempt to save me from a folly I’d regret, the man stepped close enough for me to smell him – and once again to throw sense to the winds of instinct. Yet even then, confronted by my stubborn chin, it’s to his credit that he tried again.
‘I can see you’re hugging yourself with excitement at the chance of killing people with God’s blessing, Garon. But aren’t you afraid that when you leave her your new bride will be at risk from ruthless men like me?’
‘Should I be?’
‘Well I’m a bollocked male and manifestly she is not.’
‘My mother will protect her for me.’
Hugh sighed. ‘And if you’re spared to see more summers, will you eventually acquire more grains of sense do we suppose?’ He held my stare for once without his mocking smile, then shrugged and turned away. ‘No, I see that you will not. I see that you’re the kind of militant who has no use for understanding.
‘Devil protect us from idealists,’ he added to the cloud of gnats above his head.
‘Delay no longer, arm yourselves and join us in this just and holy war!’ Archbishop Baldwin cried. ‘Join the General Passage now assembling to drive the Saracens forth from the Christian Orient. Take up the cross for God and your new king!’
‘And clap your hands together, let your voices ring,’ Sir Hugh misquoted from the mummers’ show we’d seen on Lewes meads two days before. ‘For Christ, for King, for England and a bag of moonshine we joyfully will sing!’
But all my thought by then was on the further bank where bishop’s chaplains were already labouring with shears and copper pins, to fashion strips of linen into crosses for their new recruits.
‘This cross will cost you nothing.’
The old man clambered from his boat to fetch a sample of their work and hold it up for all to see. ‘And yet consider that this scrap of cloth will guarantee a Christian victory and all the treasures of God’s Kingdom to any man who has the courage to receive it.’
But what I saw was not only a white cross. As the sun lit the piece of fabric which he held aloft, I saw it as Escalibor, a silver sword surrounded by a shining light, and I was dazzled!
What else was in my mind? I am ashamed to own it, but I think that more than anything it was de Bernay’s disapproval of croisade – the thought that I would go and he would stay behind, that finally made up my mind. I might have failed to beat him in the tourney. But in this adventure I’d succeed. My father would be proud.
‘My Lord Archbishop, I’ve the courage. I will take it!’ A seagull laughed.
So what was done was done. If I could live that day again, undoubtedly I’d live it differently. But at the time it seemed I had no choice. My aches and bruises and my woolly head entirely out of mind, uplifted by by vision of the sword – and very much aware of how I looked from where Sir Hugh was standing – I backed three paces, took a run, and jumped.
Jumped out of one life clear into another!
In fact the splendour of the leap was somewhat lessened by the saturated state in which I reached the further bank, to be presented to Christ’s Deputy in England on muddy hands and knees.
‘Most Reverend Father, I will take the cross,’ I said, and laid my life before him like a dog who runs to fetch a stick and drop it at his master’s feet. That’s what I was, an eager dog retrieving an idea.
‘Dieu le veut, God wishes it.’ The old man smiled as he removed a strand of duckweed from behind my ear, then grasped my wrist to help me stand.
‘My son, I bid you welcome to our company of crucesignati,’ he pronounced. ‘Take up thy cross and make this pledge as I enjoin thee…’
‘I give myself to He who as a victim surrendered His own body by dying for my sake.’ Repeating the croisade oath, I stared up like a man in love into the archbishop’s saintly face. ‘I reject hereby the trappings of this world and scorn it’s fleshly pleasures, praise the Lord!’
Of those who watched us from the further bank, only my stepfather and the two squires seemed unaffected. All about them men were whooping with excitement – Sir Rob, Sir Dickon and Sir Mark le Jeune, tearing up the bank toward the river bridge, or leaping down as I had done to splash across the muddy stream. With giant Sir Wolstan braying like a jackass and daring everyone to cast themselves into the bishop’s trawl.
Jos told me afterwards what happened next.
‘Well Joscelin, we all of us look better by comparison with fools,’ Hugh told him drily. ‘So I’m guessing that you’re not about to trust your soul to an old churchman who’s too frail to lift a sword?’
‘My Lord, if that’s your best guess then ’tis well adrift,’ Jos dared to tell him. Or dared to tell me that he had.
‘God strike me blind if I would leave Sir Garry – an’ to tell the truth Sir, I’d as soon split Sarsen skulls in Pallystine as fleas at home in bed.’ Which said, he sketched a bow and loped off to the river crossing.
From where I stood dripping in the grass, I saw his foxy mop bob down the further bank toward the bridge at Cliffe. A long way round for my poor Jos.
And yet an all too short route to disaster.
CHAPTER FIVE
Westminster: September 1189
CORONATION
If you’d been present five days later on the north bank of a much larger river a mile outside the walls of London town, you would have seen a long procession move between two structures built of stone; its slippered feet protected from plain earth by a long ribbon of red fustian, four hundred ells of it, to join the Palace of Westminster to the monastic church from which it takes its name.
Inside the Abbey in a gallery erected for her special use, the Queen of England awaits the ritual she’s ordered to confirm her son a King; a thing she’s planned and plotted for almost two decades.
Her most puissant majesty, Queen Eléonore of Aquitaine, is not only the most cultured woman in all Europe, but the vainest, toughest and most self-willed princess of her generation; as ruthless in pursuit of her own ends as any of her ruthless sons.
Queens in every age contrive reputations for beauty by maintaining good health and posture – by constantly achieving splendour; and Queen Eléonore has never in her life looked less than splendid. A big handsome woman still, despite her three score years and seven, she wears a crimson gown and surcoat of an imperial style which flatters her big frame. Her wrinkled cheeks are subtly rouged, her pale brows plucked and darkened, her hooded eyes extended with a narrow line of khol. She knows the power of artifice, of colour and of polished surfaces to catch the light, adores jewels and collects them. Her arms are ringed with bracelets. Her veil is held in its place with a Byzantine diadem, its gems repeated on the hanger of her girdle. Her braided, brindled hair is wound with strings of lapis beads and river pearls. The pulses of her neck and wrists are scented with Egyptian perfume.
Taut-strung and energetic; it’s only by an act of iron will that Eléonore refrains from craning forward in her seat. On her right hand sits the French King’s pallid sister, Alys, who’s been betrothed to Richard for more than twenty years, and on her left his aunt by marriage, the Countess of Warenne; three females privileged to witness the otherwise entirely masculine performance of a coronation.
The Queen’s long fingers drum her knees while she keeps turning to the Abbey’s great west door through which her son will enter, impatient for the sight she has so long – so very long awaited.
‘The cheering’s louder, Isabel. So are they here at last?’ she demands of her sister-in-law in a voice as gruff as any man’s and quite as deep as some; her days as the soft-spoken Rose of Aquitaine long gone, if not forgotten. ‘Yes, here they come, and here’s the Litany to bring them to the altar.’
The Queen supplies the answers for herself, a habit she’s acquired from years of close confinement. ‘Here’s Canterbury with Rochester and my old friend of Rouen, and there’s My Lord of Winchester who bears the cap for Richard.’
The clerical vanguard proceeds in orderly succession; their censers wafting aromatic smoke through all the aisles and apsidal chapels of the Abbey; their candles striking colours from its painted columns. Behind the bishops and archbishops the new king’s brother, John, and David Prince of Scotland hold the rod and sceptre, symbols of royalty more ancient than the crown itself. Six further earls, amongst them Hamelin of Warenne, carry the Royal Vestments, the gilded swords of State and Justice and the Confessor’s broadsword, Curtana, blunt-ended in token of Royal Mercy.
But Richard walks alone, as only Richard may, immediately behind the earl who bears the jewelled crown of Alfred and Saint Edward. When Eléonore came to her coronation, she’d clasped a live white dove in the manner of the ancient queens. Richard’s hands are empty. And yet for any disappointed by the unimpressive figure of his brother, the appearance of this prince accords exactly with his legend; his broad face positive in all its features, burnt dusky red from long exposure to the sun, his form heroic, powerful as a viking’s.
Clad in a purple tunic trimmed with miniver and embroidered on one shoulder with the white cross of his mission, he strides stiff-legged with belly taut and shoulders back; a gait that he’s perfected to show his outsized figure to advantage; his only cap a peach-gold mane of hair, his only jewellery a pair of gilt wire rings hooped through his ears. As they sweep down the ranks of grand seigneurs who bow their heads on either side, Richard’s green eyes are fierce with pride; his status validated by universal approbation.
Out of my flesh,
thinks Eléonore.
I made him and I made him what he is, the Golden Hope of Christendom!
‘He is the pick of all my brood,’ she says aloud, her bracelets clashing and her old joints cracking as she bends the knee to her third-born but eldest living son.
‘There is a prophesy of Merlin attached to me which promises great things from my third nestling,’ she tells My Lady Isabel, ignoring the three dynastically irrelevant princesses who preceded Richard in the royal nursery.
‘And now it seems his day has come.’
‘Your Majesty, the whole country is rejoicing with you.’ The Countess of Warenne moves just too late to help the old queen to her feet. ‘One only has to look at him to see he is a leader natural born, a very paragon of kingly virtue.’
And that he’d better be,
thinks Eléonore while her great nestling struts the Abbey nave towards the Shrine of the Confessor, where she herself was crowned with gold when God was still a boy. First undisputed claimant to the throne of England since before the Conquest; an emperor in all but name, by God’s good grace Richard’s to rule the greatest Christian power in a millennium; an empire it takes months to ride across from one end to the other.
In the eight weeks since Henry’s burial at Fontevraud, a new die for the Great Seal of England has been struck, to show the King on one side riding out to battle and on the other solemnly enthroned, with action and judgement thus confirmed as aspects of his majesty.
Although he’ll need to be a paragon of both,
his mother tells herself,
if Dickard is to take Jerusalem and still hold fast to all our western acquisitions.