Outlaw

mock ‘courts of love’, which Queen Eleanor had introduced from her native Aquitaine, in which poets and troubadours would compete by performing their love poetry. The songs were judged by Eleanor and her ladies- in-waiting and the winner awarded a kiss. Bernard pricked up his ears at the sound of this. He had been sullen and quiet for most of the journey, wrapped, like me, in damp woollen misery, but when Marie-Anne mentioned these ‘courts of love’ he seemed transformed and asked her endless questions. What sort of songs did the Queen like? How far could a musician go, politically, in the satirical sirvantes? Were her ladies-in- waiting pretty? When he had at last finished pestering her, he was a different man.

‘It seems we are going somewhere that is quite civilised,’ he said to me, almost cheerfully. ‘And now we will have some proper music. You’d better pull up your hose and start practising that fancy flute, Alan. You’ll be expected to perform at some point and I do not want you to disgrace me in front of the Queen.’ He smirked at me and began to sing; the song, one of his favourite cansos in French, was muffled by his soaking hood and almost completely drowned out by the hiss of the rain as it drove down into the mud around us.

We entered the city of Winchester through the north gate, and were briefly challenged by the guard but, when the Gascon captain shouted ‘Comptess Lock-ess-lee’, the big wooden barrier was swung open and we trotted through and into the busy streets of the city. The city seemed to be more crowded than Nottingham; the houses huddling closer together, the streets narrower, meaner. The other thing that struck me most forcibly after a week travelling in the countryside was the smell. The city reeked of a thousand foul odours: of shit and rotting meat, of decaying rubbish and human sweat. I covered my nose and mouth with my damp sleeve; and then just ahead of me a householder hurled a chamber-pot of piss from a window into the street. It narrowly missed the rump of Bernard’s horse and he turned and snarled at the woman in French and she hurriedly apologised and slammed her shutters. The contents of the chamber-pot joined the trickle of foul slurry that oozed down the centre of the street and we steered our horses to the side of the road to avoid that noisome stream, picking our way around piles of rotting refuse, dead dogs and filthy beggars, crouching in their rags in doorways and crying for alms. Rats scurried away from our horses’ hooves and I thought longingly of Sherwood and the wild, clean woodland.

We clattered over the drawbridge of the castle at about noon and into a great courtyard, where we were greeted by servants who took our horses and ushered us into the wing of the castle that housed Queen Eleanor and her retinue. I was shocked at the great size of the place; just the courtyard was three times the size of the hall at Thangbrand’s and many doorways led off from it to a maze of chambers and corridors, lesser halls and, of course, the great hall where Queen Eleanor would dine with the constable of the castle, and her nominal captor, Sir Ralph FitzStephen. In truth, Eleanor was not as confined as closely as she had been in previous years, when she had been totally cut off from the outside world, and denied any company save for her maid Amaria. In fact, at one time, Eleanor’s quarters had been so spartan that she and Amaria had had to share a bed. Now, although the King still kept her closely guarded for fear that she would encourage support for their son Duke Richard, with whom he was at war in France, she was permitted all the comforts that she was entitled to by her rank, including a sizable retinue.

However, the King was old and sick, and worn out by the years of constant warfare with his sons over their inheritances. When he died, and some whispered that it might be soon, Richard would become king and his beloved mother Eleanor would be an even more powerful woman. So Ralph FitzStephen stepped lightly around his royal prisoner and while she was not allowed to leave the castle, he turned a blind eye to the frequent messengers she dispatched to and received from France and Aquitaine.

Of course, I knew none of this at the time. I was in awe of the huge stone building that we had just entered and bewildered by the number of rooms that made up the royal apartments. Most people in England lived in one room, mother, father, children, and their livestock all in one small smoky space a few yards long; at Winchester there were more rooms than I had ever seen under one roof, with high ceilings and the walls hung with tapestries or painted with dramatic scenes of the chase or images from the Bible or pictures of the Virgin Mary. We were informed by the servants that the Queen was resting, but that the bathhouse would be ready in no time at all and that there were fresh clothes and food laid out in a chamber that had been set aside for Bernard and me. Goody had been swept up by the women of the household and taken away, and Marie-Anne had disappeared off to her own apartments, but we were all to meet up at dusk. So Bernard and I stripped off our sodden travelling clothes and made our way to the bath house. There, in great padded wooden tubs filled with steaming water, by the side of a roaring fire, we let the pains of the journey dissolve. It felt wonderful: servants in relays brought jugs of boiling water and topped up the bath, while another scrubbed my fast-thawing back. Bernard seemed to be burning with excitement despite his weariness; he was singing to himself almost constantly, clearly composing something, a love song, I believe, and muttering ‘No, no, no. . Ah, but how about. .’ I tried to listen to his new song but in no time I drifted off to sleep in the warm water.

We were summoned to the royal presence that evening. Washed, brushed and dressed in clean tunic and hose of rich green silk, courtesy of Marie-Anne, we were ushered into the lesser hall that Eleanor used as her private meeting place. It was still a large room, with dressed stone walls, brightly painted with what I guessed were scenes of famous landscapes from Aquitaine, and a high arched wooden ceiling. Though it was spring, two large braziers burned in the centre of the room making it pleasantly warm, and about a score of men and women, beautifully dressed, stood around the hall drinking wine, laughing and talking to each other. We entered the room, Marie-Anne leading a clean and well-brushed Goody by the hand, with Bernard and myself following. Bernard looked like a royal prince; while I had slept away the afternoon, he had found a barber in the castle and his hair, now glossy and clean, had been trimmed to a neat bowl shape; his face was shaven and he had even found time to weave coloured ribbons of red and yellow into the seams of his green silk tunic, giving him a merry, festive air. He smelled of rose oil and some other heady spice. He was the cockerel once again, bright and shiny and happy. He stood straighter, he looked totally at home in this huge and daunting castle; I suspected that he was even sober. In comparison, I felt dowdy, provincial and nervous and I was glad he had asked me to carry his vielle, which had been polished until it shone like a mirror; it gave me something to hide behind.

As we entered the hall, the crowd parted to reveal a great chair at the far end of the room, in which sat an elderly woman in a splendid golden satin gown embroidered with jewels and pearls. She must have been in her mid-sixties, an age far greater than most people achieve, nearly ten years older than I am now, but her face was lean, alert, and barely lined, and her eyes were bright as a sparrow’s under an ornate white horned headdress bound with golden wire. She was Eleanor, she was the Queen, and I realised with a shock that despite her advanced age, she was still beautiful.

She smiled when she saw Marie-Anne and stood up and beckoned her forward. ‘Welcome home, my child,’ she said in French. She had a warm voice, with a deep smoky burr that gave it a pleasant sensual quality. Marie- Anne curtseyed prettily and then moved forward to embrace her. Eleanor took Marie-Anne’s chin in her left hand and stared intently into her eyes. ‘So you have returned from that den of thieves intact?’ she said. Marie-Anne seemed to blush, and replied: ‘Yes, your highness, as you see, I am quite unharmed.’

‘Hmmm. And how is that dreadful Odo boy?’ she asked.

‘He is well, highness,’ Marie-Anne replied, ‘and he sends you his respectful greetings and this gift.’ At this she handed over a heavy gold ring adorned with a great emerald, the size of a quail’s egg. Eleanor took it, in an already much-beringed hand, and turned it to catch the light from a torch burning in a becket set into the wall. Then she laughed: a dark, intimate chuckle.

‘He is a terrible fellow; I gave this ring personally to the Bishop of Hereford as a parting gift the year before last.’ She sounded that raspy deep laugh again. ‘He really is naughty. . but amusing, very amusing! No wonder you are so in love with the rascal.’

Then she turned to look at us. ‘And you have brought some friends with you, how delightful. .’

‘This is Bernard de Sezanne, the noted trouvere, sadly exiled from his native lands,’ said Marie-Anne, and Bernard bowed low and, looking at Eleanor, began to speak a stream of gibberish. It sounded like French but it wasn’t; it was like hearing somebody speak in a dream when you can’t quite grasp what they are saying. Eleanor, on the other hand, seemed delighted by his words. She beamed at him and replied in the same dialect, clearly asking him a question. Bernard replied in the negative but added something and then bowed again. Belatedly, I realised that they had been speaking in langue d’oc, or plena lenga romana, the tongue spoken in Aquitaine and many of the southern lands of Europe. I had heard the