XXVI

I returned to the castle after two days, as I had been advised, to find that Eustace had left on his travels again. Like love, plotting is addictive: it takes over the mind and seems to be what all of life is about, the end is lost in the delight of the means. Eustace had forgotten about me, and the gaoler had not even been chastised for my escape.

Juliana embraced me when we could be alone for a moment in the wardrobe, but no lovemaking, she told me, there was too much afoot, her mind was aflame. She was convinced that Eustace was going mad. Meanwhile, she had Christmas to think about, since it was almost upon us and there was much to be done.

‘Eustace and the steward have organised nothing,’ she said. ‘No, that is not quite right. The steward has organised a cut for himself with Master Roger the cook, who is never here, and the town butcher Gascelin, in the event of there being a Christmas feast. It is left to me to pull the feast together, and give the children, the castle, the town – and, yes, you – a Christmas to remember.’

Traditionally the highlight of Christmas was a dinner for three hundred people. People had worked hard for a year, there had been fierce storms, floods, raids from rebel soldiery, lootings by deserters, crops destroyed, buildings burnt, and the people needed to let their hair down. This one had been an average kind of bad year, and now it was time for the castle to give back a little of what had been taken. This was the way loyalty was bred. Juliana knew this. Eustace had no conception of loyalty so could not understand that it mattered.

Alongside the feast there would be charades, games, caroles, dancing, mummery, forfeits, boars’ heads, gifts for the servants, alms for the aged. There was frumenty to make and umble pies, swans to be caught, summonses to the feast to be sent out, and the whole solemn buffoonery of the season to be planned.

Of course, Juliana admitted that she didn’t have to do all the work herself, but she had to oversee it and catch it before it went wrong. Last year there had been no feast, and noses had been put out of joint. This year one of the huge, brown robin pots which seethed whole carcasses was cracked owing to a careless kitchen boy not watching the cauldron. Another one would have to be bought and fetched from Verneuil. There were a hundred, no, two hundred, such considerations.

I found her one day temporarily overwhelmed with administration – the Steward was driving her mad – and I took her out for a while, the day being exceptionally mild, to walk in the winter sunshine around the bailey. She confessed to me some of her frustrations as we walked: the poor organisation in the kitchen, the waste of resources, the complete lack of records in the cellar, all of which should have been in Eustace’s remit, at least to oversee. And then since she was on to Eustace, she told me that she had thought about killing him.

I looked around anxiously lest we be overheard, but the bailey near us was deserted. It was for much the same reason, she said, that her father had deposed his brother Robert: neither Robert nor Eustace was any good at his job. Eustace was an incompetent castellan and a poor leader, just as he wasn’t any good as a husband – which was, she said, part of his job; and should be the best part, if he had had any sense.

‘I never had a girlhood,’ she said. ‘My father betrothed me to Eustace when I was ten years old. I married him four years later. I told my father what a terrible thing he had done, and he said he was sorry, but we couldn’t always do what we liked. You can imagine what Eustace was like in bed. No, please don’t. I had my lovely daughters, and that was it, for me, as I’ve told you. I never wanted to see him again. I do not see the point of him any more. He keeps coming back here like a bad smell. Why don’t I just kill him? Or … you?’

‘You want to kill me?’

‘I mean, you could kill him, stupid.’

‘I don’t think I’m clever enough for that,’ I said, dubiously.

I was seeing a dark side of Juliana that I had only glimpsed before, but that was the thing about her. I kept seeing new Julianas. Twice in the last few weeks she had mentioned killing someone. First Fulk and now Eustace. It was not to say that they had not asked for it, but all the same. Many of us say to ourselves that we wish someone was dead, but to say it out loud, and mean it, that is something different. In view of what happened later, I should have taken more note of it – but at the time I felt sorry for her. To be so young and so imprisoned in a marriage that was forced on her; it was a terrible thing.

‘There is definitely a Roman side to you, Juliana, and it isn’t just your name,’ I told her.

The joke covered my confusion. Eustace was appalling, but I couldn’t wish him dead. Given enough rope, I thought, the man will kill himself anyway. Juliana laughed and said no more about it. If I saw danger then, I refused to accept it. I was addicted to her, you see, as Eustace was to plotting. I didn’t like her in this mode, but I still loved her.

We had arrived back at the drawbridge and, as we mounted the steps to the hall, she turned to me.

‘You will help me, won’t you, Latiner,’ she said.

It was not a question. We parted and she went back to her planning and ordering in the Comte and Comtesse’s private rooms behind the hall. She had a meeting with the butler and steward (likely to be stormy). I returned upstairs to my pupils whom I had left with the ladies in the solar making decorations for the festivities.