The Green Count Page 6

  And I could see them. I could see Emile. I could see Marc-Antonio and Nerio and Fiore.

  Sister Marie took a cloth of cotton and went to the bier and wiped his face.

  Bah. I can’t go on.

  His death delayed our pilgrimage and sent all of us into a different whirl of preparations. He was the papal legate of crusade; he was also a prince of the Church, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Archbishop of Cyprus, too. He would have hated his own burial, and all the ceremony that attended it. The cloth of gold, the frankincense, the wax candles and the golden goblets at communion; all of them served to remind me of the day he had shown me the archbishop’s ring on his finger and told me that all he saw when he looked at it was the value of food and lodging for twenty poor women for a year.

  But the impact of his death was deeper. Many of us, especially his Englishmen, as we called ourselves, suspected that with his death the whole mechanism of crusade would break. He had been in the process of travelling to Venice with King Peter’s admiral and de Mézzières to negotiate the strategy of the next campaign. I confess, on the one hand, that this very planning may have been the pressure that killed him; physically and spiritually exhausted, the reality of military planning and the reality of the horror of the sack may have undermined his health terribly. But without him … There was no one to plead in the west for the next reinforcement, which was almost certainly going to include another army of routiers under the Archpriest and the Green Count of Savoy.

  And without him, a great many of us lost heart and interest in the great empris. He had a great heart and he was, until the sack, indefatigable. No care, no worry, no hesitation in his innermost heart would keep him from giving us his advice and his spirit. His passion carried us, even after the horror.

  The king came from Nicosia for the services. I was a baron of Cyprus and entitled to a place in the king’s court and procession, but I chose instead to walk with the Knights of Saint John around the bier. Nerio and Fiore and Miles were with me, and Ser Peter, and I had no friends among the Cypriotes or the Frenchmen who now surrounded the king.

  After the service, the king sent for me. I went immediately, attended by Nerio, and, I confess it, fearful. I was standing in the dooryard of our inn, waiting for John to bring me a horse, when Sister Marie appeared as a stench of wet wool and a huge enveloping cloak.

  She smiled shyly, the only woman in an inn full of men. ‘William, I must beg a boon of you,’ she said in Latin.

  ‘Anything for you,’ I said, my eye on the stables.

  ‘I want to come to Jerusalem,’ she said.

  I didn’t choke. It was, in many ways, a perfectly reasonable request. She was a woman, a nun, who could defend herself. A good companion.

  ‘I will speak to Fra Peter,’ I said. ‘I’m fairly sure I can find you a berth.’

  ‘Bless you,’ she said. ‘And on the other matter …’ She looked both ways.

  Let me say that Sister Marie was the worst conspirator imaginable, because she was so very honest, and because she was in the throes of a deep grief.

  But John came with my horse, and she vanished.

  I was still thinking of our small expedition to Jerusalem when I rode into the abbey courtyard. The abbey was hosting the king; the court filled every cell, and the king’s wife, Queen Elanor of Aragon, was at the nunnery on the far side of the main square with another hundred knights and ladies. Remember, Famagusta is not Venice or Genoa or even London; there are fewer than six hundred good houses in the town, for all of its fame, and the court filled it to overflowing.

  The king was holding court in the abbey’s hall. It was a fine building that might have been in London or Rome: heavy stone, with timber in the upper storeys, and a fine colonnade. The king sat on a raised dais, surrounded by his intimate friends – in this case, Florimont de Lesparre, whom I knew because he was pointed out to me by Nerio, and de Mézzières, and several of the knights of the sword.

  A hush fell over the men and women in the hall as I entered, and every head turned to look at us. My chest was tight. Scrope stood by Lesparre, and I had to expect that what was coming would be bad.

  Nonetheless, I bowed deeply at the base of the dais, and then knelt in a reverence and waited to be recognised. Scrope turned his back on me; Lesparre made a great show of looking me over, and the king quite genuinely seemed deep in mourning and inattentive rather than gratuitously rude. He was speaking to de Mézzières, who wore all black. De Mézzières could see me, and kept indicating, with small motions of his head, that the king should look in my direction.

  Odd thoughts go through a man’s head. Should I be enraged? Was the king humiliating me, or simply oblivious to my presence?

  A woman said something behind me and a man laughed. That laugh was like a blow.

  And yet, I was sure that Father Pierre Thomas would have said that I was only humiliated if I chose to be humiliated. I confess that this is the sort of thing that wise old men say and that doesn’t always apply to someone following the life of arms, but the more I watched the king, the less likely it was to me that this was done apurpose. And yet …

  With the miracle I had just witnessed fresh in my blood, I had no need of anger.

  Someone else laughed.

  The Order does a great deal of kneeling. Much of it is done in armour. The articulations in your knee harness can eat away at your knees. In fact, I was kneeling on a good Turkish rug in a comfortable pair of wool hose, and I used the petty anger at all the laughter to stiffen my spine. I had been awake almost all the night before, and spent a good deal of it on my knees. I determined to show nothing – neither anger nor resentment – but to kneel and wait.

  More laughter.

  It was beginning to seem unlikely that the king really didn’t know I was there.

  It began to seem possible, if you were losing your temper, that the king was instead trying to fool de Mézzières, who would not usually tolerate such behaviour from his king.

  Florimont de Lesparre grinned at me.

  I have relived all this a dozen times. It was happenstance that I had already decided on a course that was both proper and honourable; happenstance, and perhaps a final gift from Father Pierre Thomas, or rather, a final lesson.

  Luckily, I am stubborn.

  Luckily, I had some time to collect myself, because I thought the king merely in grief, as I was myself. I’m sure, had I knelt and understood immediately that the king meant to humiliate me, that I’d have reacted in anger.

  I continued to kneel.

  Nerio had not knelt, and he stood at my back. I know now that he stood with his left hand on his long sword, and his head thrown back like a Roman emperor. Of course he did. I smile just thinking about him.

  More time passed. My knees burned, and the muscles at the base of my spine began a mild, dull ache. I had done this half the night.

  I had never done the vigil of a knight. I had been knighted on a battlefield. But I had kept vigil with Juan, who had died at Alexandria, and he had knelt for almost twelve hours. In armour. I had managed to kneel without complaint at Father Pierre Thomas’s bier.

  I set my face as best I could, and began to pray. I did not pray because I was so very good, or holy, but because I had learned that the meditation of prayer could calm me even in the moments before a fight – a valuable weapon.

  Nerio muttered something. I considered whether to answer or not, and by the time I thought of answering, the moment had passed. I would kneel in silence.

  Around me, the laughter gave way to a brittle chatter. People were on edge; men laughed too loudly, and the jape was going on too long. I no longer had a shred of belief that the king did not mean this. I had set myself to endure, and I began to contemplate the Nativity of Jesus. It was just Twelfth Night; my favourite meditation, and the first that Fra Peter had taught me when I was just a routier. I still medit
ate on it; the three Magi, and a dozen courtiers and some knights and pages, all gathered at the entry to a stable, looking at the Queen of Heaven and the newborn child. I recall that in my meditation, the Queen of Heaven was Emile and the child glowed with the golden rosiness that I had seen in Father Pierre Thomas’s face.

  I won’t say that I was unaware of the hall or my knees or the increasing pains in my back. I will only say that, like fear and rage, these things were further away, viewed as it were from a distance, and I managed to stay in my prayer for so long …

  ‘William!’ hissed Nerio.

  I came out of my dream of the Nativity to find that my back was a scream of outraged muscle and my knees were almost without feeling.

  The king’s chair was empty. The door behind him closed.

  De Mézzières looked terrible. He was standing by the empty chair. De Lesparre was also gone, and Scrope stood with his hands in his sleeves. Scrope did not look best pleased.

  It is interesting what you miss, when you allow yourself to give way to rage. Had I been enraged, I would have missed that Scrope looked … devastated. I am not saying he was any friend of mine; merely that whatever ‘this’ was, it was not his intention. It was writ in his face, and I, in my calm shell and bodily pain, began to wonder what was going on.

  Most of the men and women in the hall were on their knees, or just rising. Of course, they’d all made their reverences as the king left, and if I knew him, he’d left in a single motion of discontent. I had lived with him for six or seven months.

  I remained on my knees.

  One by one, the rest of the hall rose and moved away. They were silent; there were a few whispers.

  I tried to control my breathing, because my back hurt. But I was damned if I would give an inch. I knelt, and knelt and knelt, and the knowledge that Compline must be close was more wearing than otherwise.

  Eventually the bells rang. I rose cautiously to my feet. I stumbled, and without Nerio I would have fallen, but the relief to my back muscles was almost miraculous. My feet were odd and felt as if they were attached to someone else’s body, and I walked perhaps twenty steps like an old man or a leper.

  But by the time we crossed the threshold of the hall, my stride was better. We went to the Carmelite church and heard the service. I didn’t kneel, I promise you. But we sang the hymns, free of the court, and rode back to the inn.

  We were in the yard when Nerio laughed. ‘We are very different,’ he said. ‘I want to kill every one of them, just because they laughed.’

  I remember looking up and seeing stars. I wasn’t sure just what I felt.

  ‘I thought that at one point,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I will again.’

  ‘Lesparre will think you are … light,’ Nerio said.

  I’d like to say I said something wise, like I cannot be responsible for what Lesparre thinks or manly and full of preux, like Lesparre will learn better in time. But what I really said was banal.

  ‘Weather’s changing,’ I said. ‘The wind is fair.’

  It was odd that I didn’t care. Lesparre was nothing to me.

  It took the church eleven days to prepare to bury Father Pierre Thomas. We could not leave; even fully trained and prepared, with a fair wind for the coast of Syria and our holds filled with food and water, we could not leave. It was as if the world held its breath. Even the court – and I will not shock either of you gentlemen if I say that I think King Peter was already descending into madness – even that court of fools was in deep mourning, though I noted that of the whole court, only the queen came to the Carmelite church.

  I can’t remember how many days passed without incident. But perhaps the third or fourth day, I was at vigil with Fiore in the Carmelite church, and when I was done – and by Saint Peter, my knees were not my friends – we rose when Fra Peter and Nerio came in, swords drawn, and knelt in our places. And we both creaked like old men as we made our way slowly from the bier to the colonnade and with one accord slouched against pillars and began to do little exercises to relieve the pain.

  There were a dozen women there, kneeling quietly in the privacy of the side chapels.

  One of them was Sister Marie. It was odd to see her with other women; somehow, I’d never associated her with them. And one of the women was obviously the queen of Cyprus. She wore a superb headdress and veils that were worth more than my warhorse. She was not particularly tall, but slim and dignified and younger than I would have imagined.

  This is not a comic story, but you have to imagine that Fiore and I thought we were alone until our eyes adjusted, and so, like mimes or acrobats, we were posturing, grunting, and stretching …

  I suspect I blushed.

  The queen looked at me a moment, and then leaned forward and spoke to Sister Marie.

  She nodded. Fiore caught my eye and we gathered the scabbarded swords we’d laid against the pillars, the hilts lodged securely in the stonework, but before we could slip away, Sister Marie was there.

  She caught my hand and squeezed it.

  ‘William,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  She led me to a door – the sacristy, I think – and I realised that the queen was there to see me. It was not happenstance. And indeed, she came in with two ladies and Sister Marie, while Fiore stood outside with his sword drawn.

  I knelt. She raised me.

  ‘My Lord,’ she said in her Occitan French. ‘I must first apologise for my husband’s treatment of you.’

  There is absolutely nothing a loyal knight and vassal can say in such a circumstance. So I said nothing.

  ‘I must ask you a terrible question,’ she said. ‘It is not what these good women brought me here to ask—’

  ‘Your Grace!’ Sister Marie said in protest.

  ‘But I would trade my immortal soul for a clear answer. Has the Countess d’Herblay shared my husband’s bed?’

  ‘Madame!’ spat Sister Marie, clearly furious.

  Calm is a gift. Perhaps, I agree, I was merely numb at the death of a man I nearly worshipped. Perhaps I was numb again at the ingratitude of King Peter.

  But in truth, I think that I read her question in her first glance. She cared little for saving herself. What she cared about was her husband. I will forestall my story and say that although in the end I thought her as mad as he, in this she was noble.

  At any rate, thanks to prayer and fasting and Father Pierre Thomas, I did not give her the answer she deserved. Instead I bent my head.

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, God,’ the queen said, and burst into tears.

  I should perhaps have seen an astrologer that month – King Peter had several excellent ones, wise men with great ability. And perhaps they would have warned me that people would fall into my arms in tears. Nothing could have prepared me for Nerio; Sister Marie was an easier experience, as, despite her armour, she was a woman and a close friend.

  The queen of Cyprus was another creature entirely, and she fell into my arms and wailed, and clung to me like a limpet. Sister Marie looked as if she’d been struck; the other two ladies turned away in pure embarrassment.

  She was a queen; she collected herself as fast as she collapsed. Indeed, she might have given Nerio lessons; the moment she was out of my arms, she was upright, and very much a queen.

  ‘I need your help,’ she said simply. ‘Men seek to destroy me.’

  I know that digressions spoil a tale, but I have to pause here. Twenty years on, and many weeping women and some weeping men later, I suspect now that I was played from beginning to end. Oh, the queen certes wanted to know if Emile was the king’s mistress – that was genuine enough. And she needed me. But the tears?

  A very effective recruiting tool.

  I was just learning to master my temper, but I had not yet even begun to learn to master my reaction to women, especially beautiful ones in tear
s.

  So I knelt and asked her to command me.

  And God, who works in mysterious ways, chose that afternoon at the Carmelite priory for my Emile to be on the steps when I emerged with Fiore, blinking in the sun. The sight of her affected me, and I almost gave us away on the steps. I wanted to throw my arms around her, or kneel at her feet. And I confess even now that her smile of obvious pleasure at seeing me was restorative, so that only then did I know how black my world was becoming. Juan, Alexandria, Father Pierre Thomas.

  I needed her.

  She passed me, and Jean-François gave me a greeting and we clasped hands, as Bernard did with Fiore, and in that moment, the queen of Cyprus came out of the central doors. She paused, two steps above Emile.

  And then she smiled, and stepped towards Emile and extended her hand in greeting.

  I saw Emile’s hesitation and knew, in that single heartbeat, that there had been jealousy and bad blood. Being away from the court meant I had seen none of it; of course, Emile had been back at court the last sennight.

  And then she, in turn, smiled, and the two women clasped hands.

  I was going to look a fool if I stood and watched.

  Fiore’s eyes slid off them – two of the handsomest women you might ever see, dressed like portraits in a book of hours, both beaming with happiness.

  ‘I have been thinking about crossings with the sword,’ he said happily, ‘all the time that we were kneeling, and I have come to the conclusion that, while every crossing is its own self, nonetheless they can be classified three ways. May I show you?’

  I laughed at him. But later that afternoon, there I was in the inn yard, trying to get to a cross that would allow me to enter for a grapple by following his direction and his categorisation.

  This was life with Fiore; I think he loved Father Pierre Thomas, but he loved his weapons more, and nothing stopped him from considering these things. I can only compare him to two very different walks of men: fishermen, and astrologers. I have known Cypriote fishermen to stare at the water for hours with a line out, and still be instantly attentive in the moment the great tunny strikes the hook. That was Fiore. And, on the other hand, the very wise astrologers who study the heavens every night and react with delight to a shooting star and rapture to the hint of a new comet … That is also Fiore.