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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Two Castles

Elinor and Iseut were assigned a chamber of their own in the castle, which the Marchesa took pleasure in furnishing with every comfort. At last the women were able to unpack what belongings they had saved from Saint-Jacques and put their pitifully few clothes and possessions into chests. All the jewels were unsewn now and, with the coins, were hidden under cloaks and dresses. Although Iseut was content to live as a dependent of the Marchese, at least for the winter, that money and those gems represented what was left of her independence.

But Guglielmo of Monferrato was a generous host and when his wife told him what poor clothing and adornment the two women had, he made them many presents of gowns and fine linen.

When they had been at court a week, he sent word that he would like a private audience with Iseut and there she told him about Jaufre and the Fourth Crusade.

The Marchese was a good listener. At the end he said, ‘You know that my father left on the same crusade as your lord? They might well have met and known each other. The last Marchese was a good man and a good father. I fought alongside him in many battles with troublesome neighbours. And I would have gone with him to the Holy Land.’

‘And why did you not?’ asked Iseut.

‘Because he forbade it. I am his only son, save my little half-brother Demetrio. And he is still only four. The Marchese insisted that I should stay and govern Monferrato, in case he didn’t come back. And of course he didn’t – like your husband.’

They were both silent for a while.

‘I heard what happened to your father – it was terrible,’ said Iseut gently.

‘Yes,’ said Guglielmo. ‘It was, but I must not think of that now. I have to rule my lands as best I can and I must continue the tradition of my father’s court. He was always generous to widows and orphans and I would wish to follow his example.’

‘So I have heard,’ said Iseut. ‘And I have also heard that your father was a great patron of music and poetry. Did his own troubadour not fight and die at his side?’

‘So they say,’ said Guglielmo. He had his own views about troubadours; since his father’s death many of them had written poems urging him to go and avenge the dead Marchese. But Guglielmo saw nothing to be gained by listening to their advice, except further bloodshed and a doubtful chance of victory. He preferred to stay in Monferrato and encourage the poets to write about something else.

‘I am myself a trobairitz and so is my companion Elinor,’ said Iseut. ‘Though we are not yet greatly experienced poets and Elinor has started composing only since she came to me at Saint-Jacques. Yet we would both rather rely on your patronage than on your charity.’

This startled the Marchese out of his reverie about troubadours.

‘Both trobairitz?’ he exclaimed. ‘Then doubly welcome at the court of Monferrato. We shall not expect to hear much from you yet but when you are ready to give my joglars something to perform, we shall be honoured to hear it.’

Iseut’s heart lifted, till she saw how the Marchese was looking at her. It was a speculative assessment, not like a man attracted to a woman but more like a farmer assessing a cow he was thinking of purchasing. She saw with sudden clarity that he was mentally matchmaking. This great lord, for all his power, his army and his castles, was casting around in his mind to see if any of his knights might make a second husband for her!

She told Elinor her suspicions, as soon as she was back in their chamber.

‘And he’ll do the same for you, be sure of it,’ she said.

‘What shall we do?’ asked Elinor. ‘You surely don’t think we should leave?’

The thought of returning to the road with no better destination in mind appalled both women. It was well into November now and the nights were cold. Their bedchamber with its own fireplace was welcoming and cosy and to go back on the road without a goal or plan would have been madness.

‘No,’ said Iseut firmly. ‘We shall stay and eat the Marchese’s meat and wear the Marchesa’s clothes but we shall spend our days in composition and offer our songs and poems in return for their care. They’ll never think of marrying us off before the spring and then we can decide what to do. Besides, it might be amusing to see whom Guglielmo has in mind.’

Elinor was not so sure; the only marriage proposal she had ever received had been far from amusing.

But at the next feast day, when they might have feared eligible suitors would be presented to them, the evening turned out very differently.

The joglars had sung and played and the dancers and acrobats and jugglers had entertained Guglielmo’s guests, when his senescal came and spoke into his ear. The Marchese continued his father’s tradition of never turning anyone away from his great hall during a meal and it seemed that a knight had come to the gate all the way from the Midi. Iseut and Elinor gathered that much but it seemed the man did not want to enter. He had asked instead for Guglielmo to come to him.

The Marchese was disconcerted; he considered it ill-mannered to leave his guests, who did indeed include possibly eligible suitors for the ladies of Saint-Jacques, but the knight had been most insistent and the senescal looked very grave.

With many elaborate courtesies and excuses, the Marchese left his board and the women glanced at one another, fearing something but doubting what it could be. He was not long gone, however, and brought the knight with him, making space for him at his table and pressing him to take wine and some sweetmeats at least.

Elinor recognised the red and gold of his surcoat; here was someone else from her homeland and she longed to question him.

Guglielmo stood and rapped the table, calling all to listen to him.

‘This young man,’ he said, ‘has ridden hard over a long distance to bring bad news. Viscount Trencavel is dead.’

It was no different a fate from what Elinor had feared but it was so definite, so final. She had seen the young Viscount and his wife on several occasions; as her father’s overlord he had even come to Sévignan more than once. She had heard about his capture at Carcassonne and about the way his titles had been usurped by the French victors. But dead! As long as he had been a prisoner in his own dungeon there might have been some hope – some talk of ransom or other bargaining for his release. But now all hope had died with him.

‘The French “Viscount” de Montfort,’ spat the Marchese, ‘is giving it out that Trencavel died of dysentery. But I think we can discount that. The man was alone and unarmed, chained up in a dungeon. What would have been easier than to eliminate him with a dagger or rope? And what had he done, except own some fine castles and rich lands?’

‘Does his son live?’ asked the soft-hearted Marchesa, whose own little boys were no older than the small heir to Trencavel’s title.

‘He does, my lady,’ said the knight. ‘The Viscountess Agnes has accepted a pension of three thousand sols and is under the protection of the Count of Foix, with her son. But of course she is viscountess no more – that title is reserved for Alice de Montfort. And little Roger has lost his father’s title to a Frenchman. Viscountess Agnes had to promise he would never try to get it back.’

‘And the cur had Viscount Trencavel’s body laid out in the cathedral for all to see,’ said the Marchese. ‘As if to honour him. He who was kept a prisoner in his own dungeon! There is no limit to the man’s effrontery.’

Elinor felt that her heart might break. She had no idea if any of her family had survived the French onslaught on the south and she had been as horrified as everyone else when she had heard the news of the massacre at Béziers. But the word of this one death was somehow worse than anything she had heard so far because she could see a picture in her mind of the young Viscount, tossing his baby son up into the air and smiling as the boy crowed and the pretty Viscountess gazed indulgently at them both. Now the father was dead, almost certainly murdered, the son dispossessed and the wife a widow, dependent on the protection of another southern noble, just as vulnerable as her husband had been.

She could bear it no longer. Elinor whispered in Iseut’s ear. All around them voices were raised in anger and shock as the news sank in. Trencavel had been a popular overlord and his fame had spread even into Piedmont. His death was viewed as an outrage too far.

Iseut spoke to Guglielmo and he clapped his hands again for silence.

‘We shall honour Viscount Trencavel as a fallen comrade,’ he said. ‘As if he had died on the battlefield defending his lands and castle. Not having met his end in a dank and unhealthy prison, whether by disease or treachery. The Lady Iseut reminds me that we have at our court Lady Elinor of Sévignan, daughter of one of the Viscount’s vassals. And she would like to sing for us a lament, written by Lady Iseut, but to a tune of her own composition.’

Elinor came down and spoke to the musicians. She stood straight and slender in a dark red gown and sang the planh that Iseut had written for her dead husband, to a tune she had been working on for months.

The joglars soon picked it up and produced a soft accompaniment on rebec and tambour. She poured into it all she felt about the destruction of the south and the loss of her own home and family. It was unusual for a trobairitz to sing in public but this was an unusual occasion and Elinor’s plangent melody fitted the melancholy mood exactly.

When she stopped, there was long silence and then a roar of approval, as Guglielmo pledged a toast to ‘Trencavel, Sévignan and the people of the south!’

‘Well sung, Elinor,’ said Iseut, when she sat back down, and the Lady’s eyes were wet with sadness for the death of more than one man.

The news of the Viscount’s death had reached Termes from Carcassonne as the garrison was settling in for the winter. Bertran was stunned. It seemed such a short time ago he had been with Viscount Trencavel in his castle, when the Legate came to arrest him. All the knights were similarly affected. The young Viscount had been liege lord to most of them, although many were older than him, and there was a warmth of feeling towards him that made his ignominious and unnecessary death seem all the worse.

They held a memorial Mass in the church at Termes and Bertran went, though he didn’t take the Sacrament. He noticed about twenty others who refrained, telling him more clearly than he had known before who were what the Pope would call heretics. They never discussed religion in the garrison; whatever the reason this carnage had begun, it was clear now that it was all out war between the north and south.

The young Viscount hadn’t been a Believer – or if he had he had kept it quiet – and he had never been accused of any crime. The Abbot of Cîteaux had broken with every honourable convention of law by not accepting the Viscount’s submission at Montpellier. It was Trencavel’s uncle, the Count of Toulouse, that the vast army had been assembled to crush and by joining the French he had deflected the onslaught on to his nephew.

Feeling against the Count of Toulouse was running high; he was known to have sent his own representatives to Rome so that his lands wouldn’t be confiscated. And if he succeeded, he would have lost nothing in this war that had caused so much death and destruction.

All the faidits wandering through the south, sheltering where they could in the empty castles abandoned by the northerners, blamed the Count of Toulouse for their situation, even more than they blamed the French.

Sévignan was one of the abandoned bastides. Bertran had gone with a small band, including Gui le Viguier, to check the lie of the land in his old lord’s hill town. But though abandoned, it was not quite empty. Bertran knocked on the wicket gate and a grizzled head appeared.

‘Friend or foe?’ asked the keeper.

‘Foe to the French,’ said Bertran recklessly.

‘Then friend to us,’ said the man and opened the gate to the little party. When he saw Gui, nudging his horse through, he rushed up to cling on to his stirrup.

‘Is it you, young master?’ the old man asked. ‘Lord le Viguier and your sister are here.’

It was true. No one knew what would happen in the spring, whether the French army would return to reclaim its prizes won so easily the summer before. But for now, in the unusually cold and wet winter in the Midi, the forsaken castles and hill towns could provide shelter and some meagre rations for the landless lords who had been ejected from their own keeps.

Lord Thibaut and Blandina were warming themselves by the one log fire in the deserted hall. They fell on Gui with joy when they saw him; they had thought him dead in the defence of this same bastide. Gui hadn’t had the heart to send Sicart, the old senescal, back out into the wilderness to find his father. The messenger he had sent in his place had come back unable to find where Thibaut was. But the old man and his daughter had found their way to Sévignan after they had surrendered their own bastide.

Bertran left them to have their reunion in peace and wandered the keep looking for signs of the life that had once been his to share. All the tapestries and hangings had gone, looted by the French, and all the portable plate and furniture. The kitchen was cold and empty, though there were logs enough stacked in the hearth.

Bertran stood a moment to remember Hugo the cook, who had died so bravely.

Then he pulled his cloak tight about him and went up to the battlements. The walls were still intact, because of Lord Lanval’s actions. Perhaps this castle would one day again be home to a member of the family? He longed for the war to be over and to bring Elinor here to her inheritance and restore her mother and sister to her. Perhaps even one day there might be a marriage for the donzela, maybe even to young le Viguier, and a good life rebuilt here, where the troubadour had spent so many happy hours before the war.

He shook himself; these were idle dreams. And it went against his religion to regret the loss of earthly possessions. It was all just matter. Even Big Hugo and Lord Trencavel had been made of the same gross stuff as himself and death had released their spirits from the dull heavy envelopes of their bodies. He should rejoice really, but Bertran was a man and a poet even though he was a Believer, and he could not bring himself to feel joy instead of sorrow as he stood in the cold empty castle of Sévignan.

As winter passed, Iseut and Elinor grew used to life in the Marchese’s court. It was much bigger and grander than the homes they had been used to. It teemed with servants carrying logs to keep fires roaring in all the rooms and hanks of wool to stuff into any crack that might let the wind find its way through the thick stone walls. It was as warm as a mild spring day, as long as they stayed indoors.

And the more that life was confined to the castle, the more feasts and entertainments were put on to amuse the court. Food was plentiful if less varied than in summer and the women of Saint-Jacques began to recover some of the fullness of figure they had lost in their long flight to Monferrato. Without the possibility of walking or riding in the countryside they grew sleek and glossy as kitchen cats and fell into a kind of torpor.

Iseut had been right about suitors. Even in the cold months a stream of young and not so young Italian nobles visited Guglielmo, though Elinor couldn’t tell if they had been summoned or if it was just the Marchese’s custom to entertain widely in the winter.

She noticed one knight in particular, who seemed to be constantly, as if by accident, put in the way of Lady Iseut. He was called Alessandro da Selva, and was a vassal of the Marchese from one of the towns in the south-west of the Monferrato region. Alessandro was the older son of the Lord of Selva and would one day inherit a very substantial castle and fertile lands, the Marchesa told Iseut.

‘Don’t they make a handsome couple?’ she said to Elinor one day when Iseut and Ser Alessandro had their heads bowed over a game of chess.

It was true: they looked very similar. The knight was about the same age and had the same fair hair and grey eyes as the Lady, though this made them look more like close brother and sister than a pair of courting lovers in Elinor’s eyes. And she couldn’t help noticing that Alessandro did not behave like a lover.

He had many conversations with Iseut, it was true. He was a cultured man, interested as much in poetry and music as in the knightly skills of hunting, jousting and warfare. But he didn’t sigh or roll his eyes, never pressed his hand to his heart or recited poetry to Iseut. And Elinor couldn’t help noticing that he often cast a look in her own direction.

Often when she thought she could watch his behaviour towards Iseut unobserved, Alessandro would look up, as if he felt her gaze on him and then she had to look away swiftly. It would not have been at all seemly for the young knight to think that she had any interest in him for herself.

It made Elinor smile. I am turning into the kind of young woman my mother wanted me to be, she thought, if I can use words like ‘seemly’ even in my own head!

And so the cold months wore on in Italy, in feasting and courtesy and warmth and with no fear of invasion or siege.

But in Montpellier, King Pedro had refused to accept Simon de Montfort’s homage as his vassal.

‘He may call himself Viscount of wherever he likes,’ said Pedro. ‘But Trencavel was my vassal and he was foully done to death. I won’t be suzerain to that murderous French upstart.’

The Count of Toulouse, on the other hand, seemed prepared to do anything to win favour with the Pope and with the leader of the northern forces.

But a week or so later the bodies of two monks were found on the road outside Carcassonne. They were Cistercians, servants of Milo, the Papal Legate, and there were thirty-six stab wounds in their bodies. The fight back against the north had begun in earnest.