The White Cross by Richard Masefield Page B

coloured sunlight to circle round and round the trembling figure of the King in Majesty upon his throne.
    ‘There’s nought amiss. You cannot think he is afraid. My son fears nothing of this world or out of it. His courage is a legend.’ Queen Eléonore’s deep voice. ‘It is the soldier’s malady of quartan malaria that makes him shake,’ she says emphatically. ‘We southerners are subject to it, as anyone could tell you who’s campaigned in the swamps of the Guienne.’
    But behind the choir, the bells and Eléonore’s defiant statement, Baldwin can hear the echo of King Henry’s curse.
    ‘I call on heaven to curse Richard’s soul! May God deny it its eternal rest until I am avenged!’
    Above, behind the bat which circles Richard’s head, there flickers through the old archbishop’s mind the arcane spectre of Angevin beginnings; a story whispered in the shadows.
    With a sense of deep foreboding he recalls the superstition that King Henry’s line derives, not only from Anjou, but from a fallen angel. From Satan’s daughter, Mêlusine. From a black witch who, in sight of Christ’s Own Sacrament, was commonly supposed to have changed herself into a bat and flown in terror from the altar.

CHAPTER SIX
    Yes well, I’m thinking. But the more I think the less I seem to know what’s best.
    I’ve never found it hard to make my mind up in the past, and no one’s ever called me indecisive. But when I listened to Sir Garon trying to explain why he must join the Kings’ Croisade, I simply couldn’t think what was expected – if I should back him in a cause that everyone calls glorious and noble, or keep him home, as Maman says I should, by any means I can?
    My Lady Isabel had given orders for her furnishings to be left in place for their return, when she and the Earl left Lewes for the new King’s coronation. So we were in her solar by the window at our usual occupation when Sir Garon and his mother came to see us.
    I spin and weave proficiently if I say so myself. But Turkish-point embroidery and I have never quite seen eye to eye – and when I took up my frame that morning, I found my roses had turned overnight into pink cabbages, my little bluebirds into fat blue hens!
    ‘My goodness, what a climb!…’
    My Lady Constance came in talking, went on talking nineteen to the dozen as she came across the solar from the stairway with her big son and little daughter close in train.
    ‘Come Edmay, stand by me. Do something useful, Garon, find us something firm to sit on. My Lady Blanche, you’re well I trust? Elise my dear, may I admire your work? But how unusual. What attractive colours! Poultry in a cabbage patch, is that the theme?’ (Confirming my worst fears.)
    Sir Garon placed the bench for her and she subsided, putting back her veil. ‘Heavens all those stairs, I am exhausted,’ she confided with a kind of desperate pleasantry that anyone could see was false. ‘You know I am to bear another child by Candlemas, God willing. We’re hoping it will be a boy.’
    So OLD! And pregnant to that dreadful man! (That’s when I pricked my finger on the needle.)
    In her next breath My Lady Constance told us that her son had further tidings that must certainly surprise us. Which was when Sir Garon ducked his head, performed his ‘I’ll-look-anywhere-but-you’ thing balancing on one foot then the other, uneasy as a dog with fleas – then cleared his throat and blurted suddenly that he must fulfil his oath to join the Kings’ Croisade.
    ‘But be assured I will survive,’ he told the floor. ‘My knight-service is but for forty days. So when the Holy City’s taken I’ll return.’
    ‘Unless you’re slain, to leave your wife to moulder in the wilds of Sussex!’ In her distress Maman looped her girdle up into a knot that I could see would take her ages to untie.
    For me the knot was on the inside while my future was discussed – and still I can’t think what to do.
    But was it really just this morning we