XXXII

The dinner that evening was to become famous at Breteuil among the pages, squires and knights, and the servants who served and stood in attendance – famous for the lavishness of the entertainment and for the sight of Comte Eustace trying to contain his temper until it swelled him up like a great red pumpkin. It all started well. Eustace had given in to his wife’s requests for a show, and the place was full of colour and delightful odours. The rushes had been changed and the floor under them swept and scraped and swept again. Tunics, mantles and hose were bright with yellows and reds, magentas, purples and greens. Eustace wore a clean linen coif decorated with feathers and buttons and tied by strings under his great chin, which made him look like a booby. Juliana wore a gorgeous dress of wonderful green whose colour seemed to have been plucked fresh from the forest.

The whole castle smelt of good food.

The feast started with a course of fish – removes of carp and pike, boiled and stuffed with ingenious spices and served with curious sauces, scallops, eels and lampreys of which the Duke was known to be especially fond.

While this was being brought on, served and eaten, a group of musicians with harp, oliphant and four lyras started to make sweet music in the gallery, above the increasing din of the party.

The feast progressed to swan, duck, and capons stuffed with larks’ tongues, and vegetables: new carrots and cabbage and leeks from the castle gardens. This was followed by a remove of venison and wild boar from the Comte’s forests, you know the sort of thing, and then a great roast baron of beef which the Duke especially praised for its tenderness.

‘If only some of my barons were as tender as this, how easy my life would be,’ he remarked to Ralph Harenc who sat near him, though he meant it to be heard by Eustace as well. There was hearty laughter in which Eustace joined though he did not quite catch the joke. However, it encouraged him, now that the feast was well under way, to raise the topic which was nearest to his heart and upon which this whole occasion was contrived.

‘How think you, my lord, perhaps we can now talk about …’ he began, but the Duke cut him short.

‘I can predict the future. Did you know that?’ he spread out his arms, addressing the top table.

‘Tell us,’ the top table shouted.

‘I know what the Comte Eustace here is going to say next.’

‘What is he going to say next?’

The duke turned to Eustace and raised a questioning eyebrow.

Then, as if pulled by wires, they both spoke at once:

‘Ivry.’

The top table erupted with laughter. Eustace laughed too although I could see that he wondered if he had been made to look a fool. He decided he had, which made him enraged with the Duke. It was too bad to be made to look a fool in his own hall.

‘Yes, Ivry,’ he went on. ‘The castle is, by rights, mine. It belonged to the great William de Breteuil, my grandfather.’

‘Yes,’ said the Duke, ‘who bestowed it upon William?’

‘Why – the Duke of Normandy?’

‘Precisely. That is why, when your uncle died, I decided to take it back. It was, and is, useful to me.’

‘But a gift is a gift. It is not a loan.’

‘Everything in Normandy belongs to me. I am the Duke. If I decide, on someone’s death, to take back what is mine, that is … what I can do. The castle was granted to your cousin by my brother Duke Robert. When the Church and certain barons called on me, I took issue with my brother and defeated him in battle because he had let Normandy run to ruin. And part of the ruin, so far as I was concerned, was letting a castle like Ivry go from my possession when it was evidently so strategically important. So I took it back. It was all part of my plan to make Normandy secure again.’

‘The castle is mine – mine, I tell you.’

Eustace was drunk by now, and angry. Juliana leant across and put a hand on his arm as if to restrain him, advising caution, but he shrugged her off.

‘By the death of our Lord,’ exclaimed the Duke, ‘you had better be careful with your words, Comte Eustace. We were going to discuss the issue at dinner, not fight over it, or I would have brought my sword.’

Eustace saw he had gone too far. He was after all the host and there are obligations in such matters, leaving aside the fact that he was talking to his liege lord.

‘Could there not be an agreement at least to look into our claim further?’ Juliana suggested.

‘Amaury thought it should be ours,’ grumbled Eustace.

‘Yes,’ said the Duke, ‘and a nasty little silver-tongue he is. He thought he could make trouble between us and then steal in and pick it for himself. He too has a claim to Ivry as good as yours, if not better. To Breteuil as well.’

The Duke paused meaningfully. I knew, of course, as Juliana had already told me, that Eustace was an illegitimate son of the old Comte de Breteuil and not a direct claimant to the title.

‘I think what we need is a guarantee of honest dealing on both sides, Comte Eustace,’ the Duke continued. ‘You guarantee your support for my campaigns in Normandy and I will give close thought to rewarding you, one of my trusted captains, with one of the castles that you crave.’

‘What guarantee would that be, Father?’ asked Juliana.

‘Well, let me see … What would be appropriate in these circumstances?’

The Duke stroked his luxuriant, dark-red beard.

The game seemed to be running away from Eustace. He had felt sure that the castle would be his by the time the croustardes came in – and they were coming in now, along with the fruits and the marchpane and the pastry cooks’ pièce de résistance – an entire pastry castle filled with raisin soldiers, ladies of honeyed almonds, and horses made of marzipan drawing little carts full of sweetmeats across a drawbridge of burnt caramel.

‘Come along, Comte Eustace, your suggestion. What do you offer when you are besieging a castle and both sides want to end the siege, but you don’t quite trust each other?’

A beam of inspiration unfolded like a beautiful dawn across the ill-ploughed furrows of Eustace’s face.

‘You’d exchange hostages, of course.’

‘Try the crustarde, Father. We made it especially for you,’ said Juliana.

I could tell she didn’t like the direction this was going. The Duke shook his head.

‘I wouldn’t mind some more of those lampreys, though,’ he murmured.

‘Bring back the lampreys!’ shouted the steward.

The shouts could be heard going all the way back to the kitchen. There was a moment’s silence in the hall as we listened to the echo.

‘Lampreys…’

‘Lampreys…’

‘So who do you think the hostage should be?’ mused the Duke.

There was a deathly silence. No one likes to be a hostage. The lampreys came back. The Duke helped himself. Finally, he spoke again.

‘I think, Ralph,’ he said, addressing his loyal castellan, ‘I think that your son Roger could fill that part. He is a presentable and clever boy. He seems to like it here. My daughter and the Latiner will see that he is well looked after. He might even learn some Latin. Just for a very few weeks while we review the situation. Then he can be with you for the summer.’

The Castellan did not look happy. He loved his son in his soldierly way, but the Duke was his liege lord and he trusted him.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘though I do it with a heavy heart. I know that my wife would have had something to say about the deal – and of course I must explain it to the lad. But I also need surety. What can I have?’

I think Juliana knew at that moment what was going to be said and even what was finally going to happen.

‘No,’ she cried. ‘No, no, no. It shall not be.’

The Duke looked saddened, upset, cross, sorry and all those things that rulers must feel when they are impotent, even though he was the master-builder of the situation. Eustace looked indifferent – he had wanted a son anyway.

‘I want the Comte’s two daughters as my hostages,’ said Ralph. ‘I know that he will look after my son, because I will have the girls as surety. We will look after them as if they were our own. My wife always wanted a girl though I never could understand why, saving your Comtesse’s grace.’

Everyone looked at the Duke to see what he would say. He sat awhile in thought, as if suddenly alone. Then he stirred himself.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They are my grandchildren and Ivry is too near the border with France. I am not having them taken hostage by the French king. I shall look after them in my castle at Caen where they will be well cared for. You, Mr Latiner, will remain here and entertain our young guest. If anything, Ralph, should happen to your son – which is scarcely likely in the circumstances – but, as I say, if anything should happen to him, I will send the girls direct to you upon my honour and my oath to be treated as the situation demands.’

The Castellan was clearly unhappy, but he could scarcely go against the honour and oath of his liege lord. I too was unhappy at the prospect of losing my little charges. The only person to seem pleased was Eustace himself who, against the earlier odds, appeared to have come out on top. Any fool could have seen that the future was full of traps and it only needed one of them to be sprung for the Duke’s design to start whirring and revolving like the Arab water-clocks that Brother Paul used to speak of. We were all like little figures, bobbing and rotating in a predestined way at the mercy of the Beauclerc. What the end of the game would be, I had no premonition, but I would have been surprised if the Duke had a triumph for the Comte de Breteuil in mind.