Officially they had been formed to combat moneylending and charging interest, which made it easy for them to persecute the Jews. And there were Christian moneylenders too, who had enjoyed the protection of the city’s older rich families but had been forced out into the suburbs by the new up-and-coming men, all fanatics like the Bishop.
In their part of the city also lived the bleachers, cobblers, tanners and weavers, where the majority of the Believers came from. As soon as the aristocrats saw the White Brothers taking up arms against not only moneylenders but heretics, they formed their own Black Brotherhood. The two bands roamed the city armed with swords and banners, some on horseback, and there were frequent outbreaks of fighting in the narrow streets.
When the Abbot reached Toulouse, at the end of March, the city was in a state of civil war. And he was no nearer to getting rid of Count Raimon. But the troops that Alice de Montfort had brought her husband had restored the French army and all the castles that had been taken last summer and recaptured by the south over the winter were all gradually coming back into French hands. The tide was turning again and it was time to crush the resistance; Toulouse would just have to wait.
In Monferrato, spring came early. Alessandro spent more and more time with Elinor and she was getting over her embarrassment at knowing he liked her. Iseut watched them both with amused pleasure. Alessandro taught Elinor to play chess and she found to her delight that she was really good at it. At first she thought he was just letting her win, in order to gain favour with her, but then she saw a worried frown as he could not get his king out of the trap she had set.
He sat back, raising his hands and laughing.
‘You have defeated me utterly, my lady,’ he said. ‘You should have been a general at the head of an army.’
‘Maybe I should,’ said Elinor lightly. Then she remembered Béziers and shuddered. Alessandro was instantly repentant.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot you have had experience of what an army can do to its victims.’
‘Not really,’ admitted Elinor. ‘I left both Sévignan and Saint-Jacques before the French got to either bastide. But I know what they are capable of and they were close on our heels when Lady Iseut fired her castle.’
They sat in sombre mood until a servant came to tell Elinor that Guglielmo wanted to talk to her. She curtseyed to Alessandro and went to the Marchese’s private room, her heart beating fast. What could he want with her? Surely it was too soon for Alessandro to have made a declaration and wouldn’t he have made it first to her rather than the burly, bearded Marchese?
The very thought made her lips curve so that it was with a smile on her face that she entered the room.
And saw before anyone else Huguet the joglar.
She knew it was not ‘seemly’ but she rushed to clasp him in her arms as if he had been her dear brother.
‘Huguet!’ she exclaimed. ‘I am so pleased to see you. But what has happened to you? You are so altered, so thin. Tell me everything. Where is Perrin and what news of Bertran?’
It was only then that she registered the other people in the room: the Marchese, a child she didn’t recognise and – could it be? – her old dancing-partner, Gui le Viguier.
Alessandro was seriously put out. He had been so happy that afternoon, playing chess with Elinor, happy even when she beat him. He had been going to turn a pretty phrase about how she had captured his king as she had captured his heart. But somehow they had got on to the subject of war instead and the mood had gone wrong for courtship. Then Elinor had been summoned to the Marchese.
And now a strange knight, much younger than him and closer to Elinor’s own age, was sitting beside her in the place Alessandro usually claimed for his own. True, neither of them was saying much but Elinor would not look in Alessandro’s direction either and she was terribly pale, toying with her food. To Alessandro’s jealous eye, this looked like lovesickness and he observed his rival with deepening dislike.
The stranger knight was good-looking, or at least Alessandro imagined he would be pleasing to a woman. He was broad-shouldered and slim-hipped and his brownish-blond hair was newly trimmed. True, he had an awkward right arm, but that just showed he was a valiant fighter as well as elegant courtier – all that a knight should be, in fact.
But if Alessandro could have seen into Gui’s mind, he would have found a far from complacent courtier, let alone suitor. Gui was playing over again the scene when Elinor had come into the room, smiling and lovely in a green gown. How lovingly she had embraced poor troubled Huguet and how her first words had been of Bertran! He was jealous, quite as jealous as Alessandro because he now saw how beautiful and womanly Elinor had become and because he believed her affections to be given elsewhere.
It didn’t matter that he was incorrect about the state of her heart; he had understood rightly that she was not for him and he felt overwhelmingly sad about it.
And then he had been forced to tell her that both her father and brother were dead and how it had happened; she would not let him spare her any details. And of the death of Perrin at Béziers, which had affected her almost as badly. Gui kept from her only the story of the mutilated victims from Bram. The little party had left Termes immediately, as soon as Bertran had been able to persuade the boys that it was no longer safe for them to stay and that he was sending them to Elinor.
Only the magic of her name had been enough to make Huguet leave Bertran’s side and where Huguet went, there the child Peire would follow. But when they had arrived at Saint-Jacques and found the ruins and ashes that were all that was left of Iseut’s castle, it had been hard for them all not to fall into despair.
But as they came down from the mountains, a shepherd told them what had happened. About the Lady’s giving away all her belongings and riding to Monferrato with ‘the other lady, the dark one’ and hope had risen again. The land around Saint-Jacques was all burned, the vines uprooted and the crops destroyed by the petulant Frenchmen who had hoped to get rich spoils from the castle. The shepherd’s flock had had very little to feed on over the winter but the grass was beginning to grow back in the lower fields.
So Gui and his little band had taken the road to Monferrato, as Elinor and Iseut had the autumn before. And now he would stay only one night before returning to Termes; his new lord and the others would be wondering what had happened to him. Gui wondered that too. He feared that he would be leaving the better part of himself behind in Italy.
.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Love Tokens
Everything changed for Elinor with Huguet’s arrival. Up until then, she had been able to feel that – apart from some anxious hours before they left Saint-Jacques and the shock of seeing Iseut fire her own castle – the war in the south had not really touched her.
But seeing Huguet so diminished from the merry boy she had known when they were joglars together and hearing Gui’s news had stripped all comfort away. Her father was dead, had died horribly, and Aimeric had died too, defending their home. She felt a wretched traitor for deserting them just because she hadn’t wanted her parents’ choice of husband.
‘And now I will never be able to tell him how sorry I am,’ she sobbed to Iseut the night that the party from Termes had arrived and the two women were alone in their chamber.
Iseut held her friend and let her cry as much as she needed to.
At last, exhausted, Elinor sat up and brushed the hair from her face.
‘My mother and sister are out there somewhere,’ she said. ‘I must do what I can to find them. At least I could say sorry to Maire. And maybe they too could settle here in Monferrato?’
‘The Marchese is generosity itself,’ said Iseut, glad that her friend’s thoughts had at last turned to practical matters. ‘I’m sure he would not mind two more mouths to feed. Look how he offered to take in the two boys – and they
are not even fellow nobles.’
‘But how can I find them?’
‘Why don’t you ask the young knight from Sévignan?’
And so, next morning, before he left to return to Termes as promised, Elinor asked to see Gui le Viguier.
At first he was thrilled but he soon realised that what she wanted from him was no declaration of love.
‘I don’t know where they went, my lady,’ he said. ‘But I shall ask for news everywhere we stop on the way back and I promise I will deliver your message if I possibly can.’
He paused then added, ‘Do you have any messages for anyone else?’
What can I say to Bertran? thought Elinor. When she considered how her feelings for him had been changed not by anything he had done or failed to do but by the mere existence of Alessandro da Selva, she could sense the embarrassment showing on her face.
‘Please tell Bertran de Miramont that I thank him for entrusting Huguet to my care, and the little boy. Tell him I shall look after them. And tell him that I am at the Marchese’s court here in Monferrato and am well.’
‘That is all, lady?’ asked Gui.
‘That is all,’ said Elinor. ‘And thank you, also, Gui, for all the news you have brought me. Though it was unwelcome, it was better for me to know.’
She was pale, with dark bruises under her eyes. Gui thought she had probably been awake all night. He found her painfully beautiful.
‘May I take no token from you, lady?’ he asked.
Elinor thought at first he meant for Bertran. Then she saw the way he was looking at her.
‘I might not survive the summer,’ said Gui. ‘The French have reinforcements and have recaptured all the castles we took from them in the winter. They . . . they do not treat prisoners kindly. It would mean a lot to me to have something from you to carry next to my heart.’
Elinor was dismayed. She was inexperienced in these matters; if she gave him something would that mean he was her accepted lover? But then she felt reckless. Gui was going back into danger and he probably would die soon. She would never see him again. So what harm would there be in giving him a token?
But not Bertran’s brooch. That was still precious to her in memory of her old love. She took from her waistband a silk handkerchief edged with lace that the Marchese had given her at Christmas, and proffered it to the knight.
To her alarm, he kissed it and would have kissed her too, she was sure of it, but then Guglielmo came in and Gui was ushered away to horse, for the journey.
Later she watched from the battlements as he rode out with his small guard party. And from a high window Alessandro watched her.
‘What shall we do, Maire?’ asked Alys. ‘It is well into spring now and I’m sure the Viscount wants us out of Narbonne.’
Lady Clara was undecided. Her daughter had never seen her like this. She had spent the whole winter drowsing like a hedgehog and was too lethargic to deploy her usual spikes.
‘We must get away,’ insisted Alys. ‘Everyone says the soldiers are coming back. The woman we must call Viscountess de Montfort brought thousands of men to her husband at Montpellier – you must have seen how many French there are now in the streets of Narbonne.’
‘What does it matter, whether we go or stay?’ said her mother. ‘We’ll be just as dead here as anywhere else.’
Alys could not bear this fatalistic streak that had invaded her mother. Clara and Elinor had always been the strong, decisive ones, while the younger sister had been docile and ready to go along with whatever was suggested. Now it seemed once again their roles were to be reversed and she must make the plans.
‘Well, I think it would be safer if we made our way east, Maire,’ she said.
‘And why do you think that?’ asked Lady Clara.
‘Because that is what Bertran advised Perrin and Huguet to do,’ said Alys. ‘And that is where the joglars took Elinor.’
It surely didn’t matter what she said now, not now that Aimeric and her father were dead and Sévignan taken.
‘Elinor?’ said her mother. It was as if Alys had slapped her smartly across the face and woken her from a deep dream. ‘What do you know about Elinor?’
‘She dressed as a boy,’ said Alys, her words tumbling out. ‘I cut her hair and Huguet gave her some boys’ clothes. She took Mackerel.’
‘She took the pony,’ said Clara. ‘I knew that. But I didn’t know you had helped her.’
If this had been the old days, back at the castle, how the mother would have raged against the disobedient child! But now the two of them just gazed at each other in silence. The news about her older daughter had at last roused Clara to some energy. Her husband, son and home were lost, but she saw that there was still something she could regain from her old life.
‘Where did they go?’ she demanded, gripping Alys’s arm. ‘Tell me again. Tell me everything.’
Alys did not know much but she embroidered her tale enough to convince her mother that they must set off immediately. The Viscount of Narbonne was indeed quite willing to let them go; to be sheltering even the wife and daughter of an admitted heretic was far too dangerous to want to prolong the risk.
He wrote them a safe conduct, which he knew was probably useless, but hoped that two women and a manservant would not be tempting enough prey for the French. And then, as soon as they were gone, he forgot about them.
This time they avoided Béziers; they had no wish to look again on its ruins. They travelled slowly towards Montpellier, stopping in every town and village to ask if anyone knew where Lucatz and his troupe had gone. But no one could tell them anything.
So they continued east, taking cover whenever they saw groups of French soldiers or smelled burning pyres.
Huguet and Peire settled in Monferrato and seemed never to want to leave Elinor’s side. The joglar gave up his care of the boy to the women of the court with a sigh that was part sadness and part relief. The child needed mothering and was soon blossoming under all the petting and spoiling from Elinor, Iseut, the Marchesa and the other ladies at court. He had made a special pet of Iseut’s little dog, Minou, and the two were inseparable.
Huguet himself sat quietly in the corner of whatever room Elinor was in, playing soft tunes on his flute or fiddle. Sometimes he joined in with the Marchese’s joglars and sang poems written by the court’s resident troubadour. But mostly he composed planhs of his own, their haunting, melancholy sounds floating round the thick stone walls of the court like morning mist.
His presence put a new constraint on Elinor’s meetings with Alessandro. The Italian knight’s expression told her that something was wrong, that something had changed between them since the little band had arrived from Termes but she didn’t know what it was. Alessandro was not jealous of a boy joglar, but he was intensely jealous of Elinor’s life before he had met her. And he suspected the handsome knight with the crooked arm had played too important a part in it.
One day in late April, he came to see her, wearing full armour.
‘Oh is there a tourney?’ asked Elinor innocently.
‘No, my lady,’ said Alessandro stiffly. ‘My armour is not just for sport and games. We are going to war.’
Huguet gave a small moan and his expression was much like Elinor’s own.
‘Do not frighten the boy,’ she said. ‘What do you mean? Who attacks Monferrato?’
‘No one,’ said Alessandro. ‘But the Marchese means to show the rebels at Cuneo who is their master and I am to ride with him.’
‘Cuneo?’ said Elinor stupidly. She remembered the wedge-shaped town where she and Iseut had stopped to rest last summer and eaten rabbit stew. It seemed a lifetime ago. She had no idea what Alessandro meant by ‘the rebels’. The only ones she knew of were the brave men of Termes, Minerve and Cabaret. And towards those she felt kindly; Bertran was one of
them and he had sent her the boys to heal.
‘It will be a real battle,’ said Alessandro, sounding like a boy himself. ‘Will you not give me a token, as you did to the knight from Termes?’
So that is the trouble, thought Elinor. He thinks I favour poor Gui.
But it was too late to undo such a misunderstanding when he stood before her just waiting to put on his helmet and ride out to fight. And just like Gui, he might not survive what was to come.
Still, she gave him a green silk girdle from round her waist and he wound it tightly round his sword arm, never taking his eyes from her face.
‘Goodbye, Lady Elinor,’ he said.
‘Goodbye, Ser Alessandro. Fight well and please come home.’
She hadn’t added ‘to me’ but he hoped that was what she meant.
The Marchesa was a bit better informed than the women from Saint-Jacques.
‘You know my husband supports Otto’s claim to be Emperor?’ she said when the army had left. ‘Well, he is going to meet him at Cuneo with the Marchese of Saluzzo and they will crush the rebels.’
‘What rebels?’ asked Iseut, who was as ignorant of Italian and German politics as Elinor was.
‘Why, those who have set up a commune there,’ said the Marchesa. ‘Don’t you know they refuse to recognise any feudal lord? They pay no dues to Monferrato or Saluzzo and such revolutionary ideas must be subdued.’
Elinor wasn’t so sure. When she was growing up in Sévignan, she had accepted that her father had vassals and was himself vassal to Viscount Trencavel and ultimately King Pedro of Aragon. But now Trencavel was dead and his titles given to a Frenchman as casually as if they had been old pairs of shoes. And King Pedro had become a real person to her since she had met his abandoned wife and tiny son in Montpellier.