Bread and Chocolate

‘We were both just children then,’ he said quickly. ‘You did nothing wrong.’

‘I was so lonely,’ she said. Her voice was very quiet, he could scarcely hear her.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You were such a little girl to be sent away to learn your manners. I never knew how they could bear to part with you.’

She flashed a look up at him, he saw her dark eyelashes were wet. ‘And you were the scruffiest squire any lord was ever cursed with,’ Ygraine said mischievously. ‘All legs and darned hose!’

He nodded. ‘You were the only one in the castle more scared than me,’ he said. ‘I used to shrink like a mouse when my lord looked at me.’

‘And now?’ she asked. ‘Now you want to defy him, and defy his lordship my father, and all of them? You want me to love you in defiance of all of them? You’ve found a lot of courage from somewhere, little squire David.’

He grinned. ‘I want us two mice to run away from this great trap. I want to steal you away to my tumble-down castle and show you the great northern skies which stretch forever. I want to take you to the seas where the waves come rolling in higher than a knight on horseback. I want to take you up to the tops of the hills where only the purple heather grows and only the golden eagles are higher. And I want to love you, Ygraine. I want to love you as if there were no such thing as marriage contracts and dowries and laws between a man and a maid. I want to fold you into my heart.’

He broke off. She had been listening to him with her eyes on the stone floor beneath his boots. The silk trailing from her hat trembled slightly. She shook her head.

‘No?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said very softly.

‘May I wear your glove inside my breastplate tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘No-one will know, Ygraine. And I am…’ He hesitated, then he told her the truth. ‘I am afraid.’

She moved towards him at that, a sudden quick movement as if she would have reached for him, and held him, and loved him at last. But there was a rattle from the doorway of the great hall behind them, and she checked herself like a young horse wrenched to one side by a hard rein.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘Let me pass, David.’ She stepped past him and went towards the noise and the smoke and the brightness of the great hall where men feasted and drank because tomorrow was the tournament and some of them would be in danger, and many of them would be hurt.

David was unlucky in his draw, he was matched against Sir Mortimor, a great weighty man who had once killed an opponent. David bowed to the lord and then rode past the box where the ladies were sitting. With his helmet under his arm and his brown hair all rumpled he looked very much like the young page who had befriended Ygraine when she had first come to the castle. He was wearing a white surcoat over his armour, Ygraine saw the tiny darn that she had sewn for him at the bottom. Their eyes met and he smiled at her as if he had not a care in the world. She smiled back, a smile of common politeness, from one acquaintance to another. That brief look had told her at once that he was afraid.

If she had heard of a knight who was afraid before jousting she would have called him a coward and despised him. It was not part of the knightly code to know fear. If she had heard of a woman who lingered in a darkened hallway and listened to a young man tell her he loved her she would have called her shameless, and wondered how she dared. Ygraine shook her head. Nothing was as simple as she had been taught.

The sun was very bright on the jousting ground, it flashed on the polished swords of the knights and glared into Ygraine’s narrowed eyes. The ladies’ box was shielded by a red and white striped awning, underneath it was as hot as a tent. Ygraine’s gown was tight, her high conical headdress made her neck stiff. She watched David’s horse trot away to the far end of the list. It looked a very long way to ride in the hot sunlight, in full armour. His page gave him his lance and David hefted it easily, testing the balance. There was no glove tied to the head of his lance. There was no glove hidden, tucked inside his breastplate over his heart. In the ladies’ box, sitting still, as she had been trained, with her stiff swanlike neck and her aching blank face, Ygraine gave a tiny shrug. She was not allowed to do anything that would damage her chances of marriage. David should have known better than to ask.

Sir Mortimor had a great bay warhorse, which had seen half a dozen battles and a thousand jousting tournaments. His armour was well polished and dented in half a dozen places. He was an old man, more than forty, but hale and red-cheeked as a winter apple. When his squires heaved him up on his horse he guffawed like a master out for a day’s wolf-hunting. His surcoat was white with the bright red cross of an old crusader. David, at the other end of the field, put on his helmet. He did not look again towards Ygraine.

‘I don’t like young St Pierre’s chances against Sir Mortimor,’ Lady Delby said languidly. The awning over their heads flapped as a sudden cool breeze blew in. It chilled Ygraine.

‘Sir Mortimor won’t hurt him,’ Liza Fielden said comfortably. ‘Why, St Pierre is little more than a boy. Knighted only two years, isn’t he? Sir Mortimor will just knock him off his horse for the sport.’

‘It’s a bad matching,’ Lady Sara said. ‘I don’t like to see a young man knocked out. He’s a pleasant youth, St Pierre. I’ve begged my lord to take him into our company often enough.’

‘He’s an independent young puppy,’ Lady Delby said abruptly. ‘Disobeying his father’s dying wish and refusing to marry, hiding himself in some cold ruin in the Marches for half the year.’ She paused and slid a spiteful sideways glance at Ygraine. ‘A handsome youth, don’t you think, Ygraine?’

Ygraine flushed scarlet but she kept her voice steady. ‘I like him well,’ she said. ‘When I was sent to this castle I was only seven years old, and friendless. He found me when I was lost one day in the woods on the west side. He put me up on his horse and led it home. I was glad of his kindness that day, and others.’

Lady Delby raised her pale eyebrows. ‘I’m surprised her ladyship allowed a maid in waiting so much licence,’ she said coolly. ‘Walking in the woods!’

Ygraine dropped her gaze and said nothing more. The trumpet sounded and his lordship stood in his box. His hand raised the white handkerchief. Ygraine leaned forward to see better. At one end of the list Sir Mortimor held in his heavy warhorse on a tight rein. David St Pierre, in the distance, looked small.

The handkerchief dropped.

Everything happened with extreme slowness, as if the horses were galloping towards each other in a dream, as if the great lances were coming down in a formal elegant dance. The crowds, even the nobility in the boxes, rose slowly to their feet. The big warhorse and the dainty mare thundered towards each other but Ygraine could not hear the sound of the hoofbeats. Sir Mortimor’s lance came up, aimed directly at David St Pierre, the seasoned old knight guessing that David would swerve to one side. But David rode straight at him, with a high fine courage, which had the poor people cheering. David’s lance smacked into the knight’s chest, shivered on impact, snapped. Sir Mortimor’s lance belted the younger man in the belly like a fist. Slowly, slowly, fatally, David was lifted, on the point of the lance, out of his saddle.

Ygraine saw him rise, saw the mare check in confusion at the loss of her rider, then heard the jolting clatter and crash of David’s cheap thin armour as he thudded to the earth at the feet of the big bay horse.

‘Sweet lady, is he dead?’ Lady Fielden exclaimed.

Lady Delby crossed herself, her lips moving silently.

‘Dead?’ Ygraine asked. It was as if she had heard the word for the first time, as if she were turning the meaning of it over in her mind. ‘Dead?’

Lady Fielden shot a quick look back at Ygraine, and her sharp eyes narrowed when she saw the girl’s face. ‘Not a word more,’ she said in a sharp undertone. ‘Ygraine, the sun is troubling me, give me your arm back to the castle. I am going to my room to rest. This is poor sport here.’

Ygraine turned a tranced white face towards her. ‘Dead?’ she asked.

‘Come,’ Lady Fielden said abruptly. ‘Take my arm, Ygraine.’

Ygraine rose to her feet but turned away from the older woman, as if she would go out to the jousting ground itself. ‘I must go to him,’ she said. ‘He wanted to wear my glove on his lance and I said ‘‘no’’. He wanted to hide it inside his armour and I said ‘‘no’’ to that too. Anything he wanted, any little thing, I denied him them all.’

‘Quite right,’ said Liza Fielden sharply. ‘Now come away!’

Ygraine took two stumbling steps, then she looked back. David’s squire had his master’s helmet off. David’s curly brown head lay on the grass. He was quite still.

‘Is he dead?’ Ygraine asked incredulously.

Liza Fielden gripped Ygraine’s arm and drew her out of the ladies’ box, through the crowd which parted to let them through, up the stone steps of the terraced garden and in through the wide open doors of the castle to the darkness and coldness inside.

As soon as the shade fell on Ygraine’s blank face she whirled around and said ‘David!’ in a cry like a falcon makes when it has lost sight of the falconer and is lost in a strange country.

‘Hush!’ Lady Fielden hissed at her. ‘You will be ruined, Ygraine. Hush and come away to my rooms.’

She half-dragged the girl through the great hall, empty now except for two large dogs nosing among the rushes on the floor, and up the turret staircase. Only when she had pushed Ygraine roughly into the room and bolted the door behind them did the woman loosen her grip on the girl’s arm.

Ygraine touched her arm as if she had been hurt. She looked with wide lost eyes at Liza Fielden. ‘Why did you take me away from him?’ she asked. ‘He’s dead now, isn’t he? My reputation is safe enough with a corpse, isn’t it? I could tell him now that I love him, can’t I? Now that he can’t hear me? I’m allowed to kiss his face now he can’t feel it? Aren’t I? Now that he will never hold me, and never kiss me. I can love him now, can’t I?’

Liza Fielden slowly shook her head. She crossed to the window seat and sat down by the slit window. Looking down she could see them carrying David St Pierre’s body, awkward and limp on a long shield. They were taking him to the chapel. Some friend would sit in vigil with the body all night long, and tomorrow they would bury him. Ygraine had no time for vigil. She must bury her loss this day, and smile and laugh and show herself ready for her mother’s order to marry a stranger.

‘No, you cannot love him now,’ Liza Fielden said with a sigh. ‘Not even now, Ygraine. You did well to hide your love all these years while you have been growing up. But you’re a woman now, and a woman may love no-one but her lord. Not even a boy who died before he could hold her. Your love is dead, Ygraine, forget it; forget him.’

She had thought the girl would flare up. She was almost disappointed when Ygraine looked at her blankly, and then the anger went out of her dark blue eyes and was replaced by the look that cattle wear, when they are walking slowly to the butcher’s yard. Ygraine’s passion had been under the yoke of obedience for so long that she could forget if she were ordered to forget. And the dangerous love which Liza Fielden had watched grow, and which she had envied, was over. Ygraine was as cold as David St Pierre when they laid him on the marble stone in the chapel and put a candle at his head and another at his feet.

When Liza Fielden’s women came in a flurry of excitement to sit with her, she nodded to Ygraine and told them to brew her a tisane of poppy-seed, and let her lie and sleep for she had been wearied by the sun in the brightness of the morning. One girl hid her mouth with her hand and whispered a word to another. Liza Fielden raked her with a look and the girl was silent. Ygraine slept as if she never wanted to wake.

They laughed a little less at dinner that night. It was still noisy – men shouting for meat or more ale, hammering at the table with the bone handles of their meat daggers, tripping the hurrying pages, throwing scraps to the dogs. But David St Pierre’s place was empty, and they left a seat and a plate for him, out of respect. His best friend, another young impoverished knight from the desolate northern moorlands, was absent too – sitting away the long cold hours at David’s side.

The ladies’ table was quieter, the women chatted in an undertone, trying to speak of something other than jousting, or David, or Ygraine. For Ygraine was missing. Her mother was tight-lipped and bright-eyed. Liza Fielden sat beside her and spun some tale about Ygraine and the sun shining too bright. But the women were as avid as adders for a drink in hot weather. The women knew. They knew Ygraine had loved him, but they had thought she had curbed herself on a tight rein, kept silent, lowered her eyes, bated her breath. Now she was missing from dinner and her lady mother was black as thunder beside the empty place.

Ygraine would be whipped, Ygraine would be ruined unless she came to dinner at once, and talked and smiled at once. Half of them thought she would never manage it – playacting fit for a mummer’s show. All of them knew she had to do it. Their eyes were as bright as cats’ hunting at night. Their gentle voices were rippling with an unstated excitement. They looked as if they had taken the fever, they were hot for her disgrace. And among them, with a look that would freeze water, sat Ygraine’s mother. A woman with a hard hand, and other daughters to dispose of too.

There was a rustle at the tapestry which hung across the little door to the hall and the women glanced over. In their sudden silence the noise made by the shouting men was abrupt and loud; and then they were quiet too. No-one could believe what they were seeing.