I had to do something about it, though, if only for my honour’s sake. One day, palming a crust of bread, I inserted a sharp but rusty iron nail that I had found in the yard that morning, making sure it was completely hidden from view. Casually leaving the piece of bread on the edge of my plate nearest to Will, I turned away from the table to ask Thangbrand about something and when I turned back the little red-haired bastard was cursing and spitting blood. He’d bitten down hard on the nail and broken one of his teeth. Of course, he could say nothing about my part in the incident, and it stopped him filching from my plate, but it didn’t exactly make us friends.
I did make one friend at Thangbrand’s: the skinny little yellow-haired girl Godifa. I was trying to stay out of Guy’s way after a particularly dreary Latin lesson — Guy had no ear for the language at all and to make matters worse he was badly hung-over after drinking heavily the night before with the men-at-arms. As he stumbled and stuttered his way through a passage of the Bible, I could feel Hugh’s impatience growing. He loved the Word of God with all his heart and it offended him to hear it mangled so. Finally, he asked me to translate the passage correctly and I did so, fluently but with a growing realisation that this display of prowess would cost me dearly. Sure enough, once Hugh’s back was turned, Guy kneed me hard in the thigh, causing my leg to go numb. After the lesson, I’m ashamed to say, I fled to avoid the inevitable beating from Guy. He stood a good head taller than me and, as I had discovered many times before, I stood no chance against him in any kind of combat.
So I had left the farmstead — it was a beautiful, warm day — and gone into the woodland to lose myself in the calm of the great trees for a while, when I came across Godifa standing by a huge old oak tree and crying her little heart out. She had adopted a kitten, which had grown into a young and daring little beast, and it was stuck up the tree. As she sobbed, it peered down at us from a low branch, miaowing piteously. It took me a dozen heartbeats to scramble up the tree and stuff the cat into my tunic before swinging down and presenting it to Godifa with a little bow and a flourish. There was an instant transformation on her face — from rain to sunshine. Beaming and cuffing away her tears she grabbed my hand and kissed it before running away, skipping with happiness. I thought little of it but, for weeks afterwards, I began to notice her following me around as I did my chores. She was very shy and would not speak to me and, if I caught her eye and smiled at her, she would immediately blush and run away.
About six months after my arrival at Thangbrand’s, there was an evening feast: a saint’s day, I think, though I cannot remember which one. At great feasts, my duty was to go around the table with a huge ewer of water, pour it over the outstretched hands of the guests into a salver held by Will. Then Guy would offer a clean towel. When all the guests had washed, I would help the servants bringing food from the cookhouse: we had roast boar; great haunches of venison, of course; boiled capons; pigeon pie; pease pudding; cheese and fruit. Each guest had a trencher: a wide, flat platter of baked bread on which they would eat their meat; the bread soaking up the juices. Will and I circled the great table pouring wine, removing dishes when empty, bringing in more courses from the cookhouse. We took turns to snatch a few mouthfuls in a dark corner of the hall, whenever we could.
On this occasion, when everyone had fed to their hearts’ content, and we had removed all but the fruit and jugs of wine, a man I had not seen before walked to the end of the hall. He was holding a vielle, a beautifully polished wooden musical instrument with five strings, a big round belly and a tall, thin neck. Holding the vielle to his shoulder with his left hand, with a sweep of the horsehair bow in his right, he struck a single long, golden chord and gradually silence descended on the boisterous gathering.
‘My friends,’ he said, as bitter-sweet sound still hummed around our head, its delicious reverberations quickening my soul, ‘this is a song about love. .’
And he began:
‘I love to sing, as singing is fed by joy. .’
As I write this line of poetry in my own language, English — he was, of course, singing in French — it seems a paltry thing, a commonplace utterance. But, then, in that ramshackle hall, deep in the ancient greenwood, it cast a shiver down my spine. It was sung with such beauty, and accompanied by the angelic notes of the vielle, that it lifted the hearts of everyone in the hall. I saw Guy’s mouth drop open, exposing a mash of half-chewed meat. Hugh, who had been about to drink from his goblet, stopped with the vessel held halfway up to his face. Then the musician swept the bow smoothly across the strings, releasing another chord, and sang:
‘But no one should force themselves to make a song,
When the pleasure has left a true heart.
The work is too hard, the labour is joyless.’
He was a youngish man; medium height and slender, with dark blond hair that adorned his head like a smooth, glossy helmet and a handsome open face. He was clean-shaven, a rarity in our community, and his face seemed flushed with goodness in the flickering firelight. Everything about him was strangely clean and neat, exact, from his spotless tunic of dark blue satin, with jewelled belt and knife, to his smooth green and white striped hose and kidskin boots. He stood out in the hall filled with muddy ruffians dressed in lumpy homespun like a proud, iridescent cockerel among dowdy brown chickens. The chickens were silent now, entranced.
‘He whom love and desire compel to sing,
Can easily compose a good song
But no man can do it without being in love.’
I had never heard glorious music of this kind before: simple yet heartbreakingly beautiful, a waft of notes and the voice — oh, and such a pure voice — echoing the tune, repeating the vielle’s refrain as the instrument moved on to a new elegant phrase. And, best of all, he sang of love: the love of a young knight for his lord’s lady; not the squalid rutting of outlaws and whores, but a pure, wonderful, painful love; an impossible love that can never find expression outside song. This was the love that inspired men to do great deeds, to sacrifice their blood for an ideal, an emotion. And I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to love. .
‘Love is pure for it teaches me,
to create the purest words and music.’
. . and I wanted to sing.
Chapter Five
Thangbrand’s hall was bright with firelight and music. At one end stood the elegant musician, his vielle cradled in his silk-wrapped arms, chin high, eyes closed, his pink mouth and white teeth wide as he poured out a golden stream of sound into the room. On benches by the walls, on the chests of personal possessions, on stools and chairs at the long table, and even squatting on the rush-strewn floor, all the earthbound inhabitants of Thangbrand’s listened in absolute silence to this heavenly music. These were the exquisite notes of another life, a life of effortless beauty, of wealth and taste and power, the power to summon delight with a clap of well-fed hands. They were hearing the gorgeous sound of a great court, the music of kings and princes. And I wanted to be part of it; I wanted to own that music, to wallow in it, to drown in its heady, sumptuous liquor.
And then it happened. In the pause at the end of a perfect refrain about the beauty and pain of love, Guy sniggered. It was only a small sound, a snort of derision. But the musician stopped dead in the middle of a line: his eyes snapped open and he looked at Guy. He stared at him for an instant, his face losing all colour. Then with the merest ghost of a bow at the high chairs at the end of the hall where Hugh and Thangbrand were sitting, he strode out of the great door into the night.
There was a great collective sigh. The spell had been broken: and yet we all longed to hear more of his witchcraft. Starting with a few murmurs, talk began to flow again about the hall. Hugh, who had been chewing a chicken leg while he listened to the music, shouted ‘Idiot!’ and hurled the bone at Guy, hitting him squarely on the forehead. Guy raised his eyebrows and palms in a pantomime of innocence.
And, at that moment, I hated him. Before then, he had been an annoyance, and someone to avoid, but at that moment all my emotion distilled into poisonous concentrated hatred: I hated Guy with true ferocity. I wanted, not so much his death, as his total annihilation; a wiping of his being off the face of the Earth.
The French musician’s name was Bernard, as I discovered the next day in an interview with Hugh after the
