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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Love Tokens

Everything changed for Elinor with Huguet’s arrival. Up until then, she had been able to feel that – apart from some anxious hours before they left Saint-Jacques and the shock of seeing Iseut fire her own castle – the war in the south had not really touched her.

But seeing Huguet so diminished from the merry boy she had known when they were joglars together and hearing Gui’s news had stripped all comfort away. Her father was dead, had died horribly, and Aimeric had died too, defending their home. She felt a wretched traitor for deserting them just because she hadn’t wanted her parents’ choice of husband.

‘And now I will never be able to tell him how sorry I am,’ she sobbed to Iseut the night that the party from Termes had arrived and the two women were alone in their chamber.

Iseut held her friend and let her cry as much as she needed to.

At last, exhausted, Elinor sat up and brushed the hair from her face.

‘My mother and sister are out there somewhere,’ she said. ‘I must do what I can to find them. At least I could say sorry to Maire. And maybe they too could settle here in Monferrato?’

‘The Marchese is generosity itself,’ said Iseut, glad that her friend’s thoughts had at last turned to practical matters. ‘I’m sure he would not mind two more mouths to feed. Look how he offered to take in the two boys – and they are not even fellow nobles.’

‘But how can I find them?’

‘Why don’t you ask the young knight from Sévignan?’

And so, next morning, before he left to return to Termes as promised, Elinor asked to see Gui le Viguier.

At first he was thrilled but he soon realised that what she wanted from him was no declaration of love.

‘I don’t know where they went, my lady,’ he said. ‘But I shall ask for news everywhere we stop on the way back and I promise I will deliver your message if I possibly can.’

He paused then added, ‘Do you have any messages for anyone else?’

What can I say to Bertran? thought Elinor. When she considered how her feelings for him had been changed not by anything he had done or failed to do but by the mere existence of Alessandro da Selva, she could sense the embarrassment showing on her face.

‘Please tell Bertran de Miramont that I thank him for entrusting Huguet to my care, and the little boy. Tell him I shall look after them. And tell him that I am at the Marchese’s court here in Monferrato and am well.’

‘That is all, lady?’ asked Gui.

‘That is all,’ said Elinor. ‘And thank you, also, Gui, for all the news you have brought me. Though it was unwelcome, it was better for me to know.’

She was pale, with dark bruises under her eyes. Gui thought she had probably been awake all night. He found her painfully beautiful.

‘May I take no token from you, lady?’ he asked.

Elinor thought at first he meant for Bertran. Then she saw the way he was looking at her.

‘I might not survive the summer,’ said Gui. ‘The French have reinforcements and have recaptured all the castles we took from them in the winter. They . . . they do not treat prisoners kindly. It would mean a lot to me to have something from you to carry next to my heart.’

Elinor was dismayed. She was inexperienced in these matters; if she gave him something would that mean he was her accepted lover? But then she felt reckless. Gui was going back into danger and he probably would die soon. She would never see him again. So what harm would there be in giving him a token?

But not Bertran’s brooch. That was still precious to her in memory of her old love. She took from her waistband a silk handkerchief edged with lace that the Marchese had given her at Christmas, and proffered it to the knight.

To her alarm, he kissed it and would have kissed her too, she was sure of it, but then Guglielmo came in and Gui was ushered away to horse, for the journey.

Later she watched from the battlements as he rode out with his small guard party. And from a high window Alessandro watched her.

‘What shall we do, Maire?’ asked Alys. ‘It is well into spring now and I’m sure the Viscount wants us out of Narbonne.’

Lady Clara was undecided. Her daughter had never seen her like this. She had spent the whole winter drowsing like a hedgehog and was too lethargic to deploy her usual spikes.

‘We must get away,’ insisted Alys. ‘Everyone says the soldiers are coming back. The woman we must call Viscountess de Montfort brought thousands of men to her husband at Montpellier – you must have seen how many French there are now in the streets of Narbonne.’

‘What does it matter, whether we go or stay?’ said her mother. ‘We’ll be just as dead here as anywhere else.’

Alys could not bear this fatalistic streak that had invaded her mother. Clara and Elinor had always been the strong, decisive ones, while the younger sister had been docile and ready to go along with whatever was suggested. Now it seemed once again their roles were to be reversed and she must make the plans.

‘Well, I think it would be safer if we made our way east, Maire,’ she said.

‘And why do you think that?’ asked Lady Clara.

‘Because that is what Bertran advised Perrin and Huguet to do,’ said Alys. ‘And that is where the joglars took Elinor.’

It surely didn’t matter what she said now, not now that Aimeric and her father were dead and Sévignan taken.

‘Elinor?’ said her mother. It was as if Alys had slapped her smartly across the face and woken her from a deep dream. ‘What do you know about Elinor?’

‘She dressed as a boy,’ said Alys, her words tumbling out. ‘I cut her hair and Huguet gave her some boys’ clothes. She took Mackerel.’

‘She took the pony,’ said Clara. ‘I knew that. But I didn’t know you had helped her.’

If this had been the old days, back at the castle, how the mother would have raged against the disobedient child! But now the two of them just gazed at each other in silence. The news about her older daughter had at last roused Clara to some energy. Her husband, son and home were lost, but she saw that there was still something she could regain from her old life.

‘Where did they go?’ she demanded, gripping Alys’s arm. ‘Tell me again. Tell me everything.’

Alys did not know much but she embroidered her tale enough to convince her mother that they must set off immediately. The Viscount of Narbonne was indeed quite willing to let them go; to be sheltering even the wife and daughter of an admitted heretic was far too dangerous to want to prolong the risk.

He wrote them a safe conduct, which he knew was probably useless, but hoped that two women and a manservant would not be tempting enough prey for the French. And then, as soon as they were gone, he forgot about them.

This time they avoided Béziers; they had no wish to look again on its ruins. They travelled slowly towards Montpellier, stopping in every town and village to ask if anyone knew where Lucatz and his troupe had gone. But no one could tell them anything.

So they continued east, taking cover whenever they saw groups of French soldiers or smelled burning pyres.

Huguet and Peire settled in Monferrato and seemed never to want to leave Elinor’s side. The joglar gave up his care of the boy to the women of the court with a sigh that was part sadness and part relief. The child needed mothering and was soon blossoming under all the petting and spoiling from Elinor, Iseut, the Marchesa and the other ladies at court. He had made a special pet of Iseut’s little dog, Minou, and the two were inseparable.

Huguet himself sat quietly in the corner of whatever room Elinor was in, playing soft tunes on his flute or fiddle. Sometimes he joined in with the Marchese’s joglars and sang poems written by the court’s resident troubadour. But mostly he composed planhs of his own, their haunting, melancholy sounds floating round the thick stone walls of the court like morning mist.

His presence put a new constraint on Elinor’s meetings with Alessandro. The Italian knight’s expression told her that something was wrong, that something had changed between them since the little band had arrived from Termes but she didn’t know what it was. Alessandro was not jealous of a boy joglar, but he was intensely jealous of Elinor’s life before he had met her. And he suspected the handsome knight with the crooked arm had played too important a part in it.

One day in late April, he came to see her, wearing full armour.

‘Oh is there a tourney?’ asked Elinor innocently.

‘No, my lady,’ said Alessandro stiffly. ‘My armour is not just for sport and games. We are going to war.’

Huguet gave a small moan and his expression was much like Elinor’s own.

‘Do not frighten the boy,’ she said. ‘What do you mean? Who attacks Monferrato?’

‘No one,’ said Alessandro. ‘But the Marchese means to show the rebels at Cuneo who is their master and I am to ride with him.’

‘Cuneo?’ said Elinor stupidly. She remembered the wedge-shaped town where she and Iseut had stopped to rest last summer and eaten rabbit stew. It seemed a lifetime ago. She had no idea what Alessandro meant by ‘the rebels’. The only ones she knew of were the brave men of Termes, Minerve and Cabaret. And towards those she felt kindly; Bertran was one of them and he had sent her the boys to heal.

‘It will be a real battle,’ said Alessandro, sounding like a boy himself. ‘Will you not give me a token, as you did to the knight from Termes?’

So that is the trouble, thought Elinor. He thinks I favour poor Gui.

But it was too late to undo such a misunderstanding when he stood before her just waiting to put on his helmet and ride out to fight. And just like Gui, he might not survive what was to come.

Still, she gave him a green silk girdle from round her waist and he wound it tightly round his sword arm, never taking his eyes from her face.

‘Goodbye, Lady Elinor,’ he said.

‘Goodbye, Ser Alessandro. Fight well and please come home.’

She hadn’t added ‘to me’ but he hoped that was what she meant.

The Marchesa was a bit better informed than the women from Saint-Jacques.

‘You know my husband supports Otto’s claim to be Emperor?’ she said when the army had left. ‘Well, he is going to meet him at Cuneo with the Marchese of Saluzzo and they will crush the rebels.’

‘What rebels?’ asked Iseut, who was as ignorant of Italian and German politics as Elinor was.

‘Why, those who have set up a commune there,’ said the Marchesa. ‘Don’t you know they refuse to recognise any feudal lord? They pay no dues to Monferrato or Saluzzo and such revolutionary ideas must be subdued.’

Elinor wasn’t so sure. When she was growing up in Sévignan, she had accepted that her father had vassals and was himself vassal to Viscount Trencavel and ultimately King Pedro of Aragon. But now Trencavel was dead and his titles given to a Frenchman as casually as if they had been old pairs of shoes. And King Pedro had become a real person to her since she had met his abandoned wife and tiny son in Montpellier.

Perhaps the ‘revolutionaries’ of Cuneo were just being realistic and accepting that the old systems must change. But the Marchesa was clearly certain that her husband should take arms against this unconventional town.

And so was Alessandro, thought Elinor. Perhaps he will die in what he thinks is a just cause, wearing my token, and he will never know how I felt about him.

Simon de Montfort was riding high again. His wife’s arrival with reinforcements in the spring had acted like a tonic on his spirits. And winning back so many castles had restored him to optimism. These heretics might take a long time to crush but, if the Pope approved fresh forces every spring, then he could do it. He no longer bothered to confer with the Abbot of Cîteaux, who had started out as leader of the crusade.

But he thought it was time to turn his attention to the three rebel castles of Minerve, Termes and Cabaret, and he began with Minerve. It was defended by steep gorges on three sides and de Montfort brought his biggest siege engines to bear on the walls. He had a new one, called La Malvoisine, ‘the bad neighbour’.

When the defenders saw the huge trebuchet being trundled into place, their hearts sank. It was aimed at their main water supply and there were three others positioned to rain boulders on the village. The bombardment went on for six weeks.

‘There’s only one thing to do,’ said the Viscount of Minerve at last. ‘We must launch a sortie, catch them by surprise and destroy that bad neighbour of theirs.’

There were only two hundred men in the garrison and it was a small party that set out by night, creeping round the north of the village on the far side of the ravine. They had brought bales of straw and wodges of animal fat with them which they packed round the giant machine and quickly set fire to.

The bad neighbour had just begun to catch when an unfortunate soldier came out of his tent to relieve himself. He was quickly silenced with a lance but his initial cry of horror on seeing the flames licking round the trebuchet brought the rest of the French besiegers down on the party and they fled back to the walls.

Their one chance of surviving the siege had gone up in smoke, unlike the mighty Malvoisine. Their water supply had been cut off and the citadel shattered; the Viscount saw nothing for it but to negotiate a surrender. He had heard of the horrors at Bram earlier in the year; messengers had come from Termes where the last of the mutilated men were dying, so he was not feeling brave or hopeful when he entered de Montfort’s tent.

It was a tricky problem for the French leader too. If he let the entire garrison go, it would hardly be an example to the other rebel bastides at Cabaret and Termes. But conventions of war demanded that a free surrender should be accepted and the inhabitants of the besieged city spared.

And then de Montfort had a piece of luck: the Abbot arrived. With relief, he handed the problem over to him. But the Papal Legate, who had not been at all squeamish at Béziers, where the city had resisted the army, balked at killing men who had raised a white flag of surrender.

Still, he had a trump card to play.

‘We will spare all the heretics who agree to convert,’ he said.

There was some muttering among the crusaders about this because they thought the heretics would just pretend to give up their barbarous beliefs. But the Frenchmen still knew nothing about the Perfects, men and women, of the south. The Legates went through the ruined streets of the citadel knocking on doors and calling on heretics to repent and save themselves from the fire.

The clergy led the army, singing the ‘Te Deum’ and carrying a huge gold cross. But the Perfects of Minerve took no more notice of it than they had of La Malvoisine; their time had come.

‘One hundred and forty of them, men and women,’ said the Viscount’s messenger, who had taken the news to Termes. ‘Only three went over to the Roman Church. The rest were burned. Some of them leapt joyfully into the flames and none resisted.’

‘We’ll be next,’ said the Lord of Termes grimly. ‘Now that they have destroyed one rebel stronghold, the French will not stop there.’

And Bertran was glad that he had sent Huguet and the boy away. But Gui had not yet returned and he wondered if the knight had found Elinor.

At Montpellier, Clara and Alys had a rare piece of luck: they found Lucatz. The Lady Maria, still clinging on to her title and her little son, had made them welcome and when they asked about the troupe that had left Sévignan more than two years earlier, she remembered the boy who had sung the lay of Tristan and Iseut.

‘Their troubadour is here again now,’ she said. ‘But with different joglars. I’ll command him to have them play in your honour tonight.’

Alys was overcome with joy but her mother was nervous. It was the first time she had met a dependant of her old court since she had ridden away from its occupied walls and the winter had sapped her of her spirit.

But she need not have worried. Lucatz was delighted to see his old domna and her daughter, though soon sad again when they told him what had happened in their bastide.

He ordered his new youngest joglar to sing a planh for Sévignan, its lord and the heir to its title and lands.

After dinner, he was invited to come and sit with the ladies and Maria enquired after the joglar who had sung for her at little Jacques’ baptism celebrations.

‘Young Esteve?’ said Lucatz. ‘There was always a bit of a mystery about him. We came across him shortly after we left Sévignan, saying he had lost his troubadour. But I ran into Ademar last summer and he’d never heard of him.’

‘Where did you last see him?’ asked Lady Clara, unable to believe there might at last be news of Elinor. ‘He, he took a pony from our stables,’ she added, to explain her interest.

‘I knew that dapple grey looked familiar!’ said Lucatz. ‘I left the boy at Saint-Jacques. The Lady Iseut there was very taken with him and asked him to stay and learn the poems she and her friend were writing. He seemed a good lad – I can’t believe he was a common horse-thief.’

‘What about Perrin and Huguet?’ asked Alys. ‘I see you have all new joglars.’

‘Ah, they left me when I went into Italy,’ said Lucatz. ‘They headed back west and I don’t know what happened to them.’

‘Why did you not stay in Italy yourself?’ asked Clara. ‘You have heard what has been happening. We at Sévignan were not the only ones to lose everything.’

Lucatz bowed. ‘I know, my lady. There is material in the south for a whole boxful of laments. But I had to see for myself. And now that I have, I think I shall return east. It is becoming harder and harder for a troubadour to remain in his native land – especially,’ he lowered his voice, ‘when some people think all of us are heretics.’

While the troubadour was talking to the nobles, one of his joglaresas was eavesdropping. She was a dark, strong-faced woman who was familiar to both Alys and Clara from the days in their old home, though they had not seen her for over two years. She gave a secret signal to Alys, who soon made an excuse to leave the table and met her in the corridor outside.

‘You are looking for news of your sister, are you not?’ said Pelegrina.

‘Of course!’ said Alys. ‘You knew of her disguise! Tell me how she was when you last saw her.’

‘She turned back into a woman,’ said Pelegrina. ‘The Lady Iseut’s friend saw through her disguise and she stayed on with them in Saint-Jacques.’

‘So we should ask for her as Elinor again when we travel east?’

Pelegrina shifted uncomfortably. ‘Lucatz doesn’t know, but we heard the French had set fire to Saint-Jacques.’

Alys clutched her throat. ‘Not Elinor too,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t despair, lady,’ said the joglaresa. ‘I remember when we were at the Lady Iseut’s court that she was advised to travel east if troubles came. If you find Saint-Jacques in ruins, my advice is to seek the Marchese of Monferrato.’