There was nothing Alain could say, no comfort
to offer to a man facing the loss of a beloved woman. But there was
the friendship that always lay between these two men. Alain put a
hand on Piers’s shoulder in silent sympathy, and they stood that
way for a while.
“Papa.” Samira appeared in the doorway. “Mama
is asking for you.”
“Excuse me, Alain.” Piers was out the door
before Alain could speak.
“Theo Alain.” Samira came toward him, her
bright young face shadowed by
worry. There was an odd catch in her voice. Alain heard in it the
sound of new maturity. “I think you should go to Mama, too. She
loves you like a brother.”
“Is she worse?”
“I have sent for the priest. He is with her
now.” Samira’s lips trembled. She swayed on her feet, and Alain put
an arm around her. She leaned against him, and he could feel the
struggle she underwent to exert her will so she would not cry.
After a while she straightened her shoulders and tried to smile at
him. “Come with me, Theo Alain. Please. She would want you there,
and Papa will need you.”
They found Piers sitting on the bed, holding
his wife up in his arms so she could breathe more easily. Alain had
seen enough of death over the years to deduce from Yolande’s
chalk-white face and fevered eyes that the end was near. In the
corner of the room the priest knelt in prayer at a bench Yolande
had placed beneath a crucifix hung on the wall.
“Alain. Dear friend.” Yolande’s voice was a
breathless whisper, the movement of her fingers barely discernable.
Alain took her hand and bent to kiss her cold cheek.
“I am here,” he said. “I will stay with you
and Piers for as long as you want me to be here.”
“
Don’t –
don’t go,” Yolande whispered.
But he did make way for Samira, who sat on
the opposite side of the bed from Piers and held her mother’s hand.
Alain moved to the foot of the bed, where Yolande could see him and
know he was there. And there he waited, while Yolande’s breathing
grew ever more shallow and tortured, while Piers whispered words of
love to her and repeatedly caressed her face, while Samira held her
mother’s hand to her warm cheek as if to infuse her own vibrant
life into the dying woman.
Alain
p
rayed as he had never prayed before,
though not for Yolande’s life; he could see
clearly that it was ending and there was nothing any man could do
to save her. He prayed instead for Samira, who was the closest
thing to a daughter that Alain had ever known. He prayed for
Yolande’s soul, which, judged by her goodness and the love in her
heart, ought to ascend directly to heaven at the instant of her
death. Most fervently of all he prayed for Piers, for strength and
courage for his dear kinsman and friend.
It was just after midnight when Yolande took
a long, obviously painful breath.
“Oh, Piers,” she said, very clearly, “I love
you so.” She let out her breath and nestled her head onto Piers’s
shoulder and closed her eyes.
There was
silence in the room,
each person in
it listening for Yolande’s next breath. It did not
come, and it did not come. Alain clenched his hands into fists,
holding his own breath.
“
No,”
Piers said, gathering his wife more closely into his arms.
“No.”
“She has gone from us, my son,” murmured the
priest, moving to the bedside. “It is time to send for her women to
prepare her for burial.”
“Alain.” Piers’s eyes were dark pools of
agony. “Take them all away. Let me have a few moments alone with
her.”
“But, my son,” began the priest. He stopped
when Alain took his arm in a firm grasp.
“Do as he asks,” Alain commanded. “Wait
outside. You, too, Samira.”
Alain tried to help Samira stand, but at once
realized she was too overcome to move. He put his arms around her,
lifting her to his shoulder like the child she still was. He
carried her into the next room, where she clung to him, weeping
bitterly, a child’s tears, copious and unrestrained, until she fell
asleep in his arms and he gave her over to the servingwomen who
bore her away to her own chamber. Then he waited once more,
achingly aware of the empty silence in the room where Piers was.
Another hour passed before Piers came out of the room, dry-eyed and
composed.
Calmly
Piers made all the funeral arrangements, ref
using to let
Alain or Samira help him.
With
grave dignity and not a single tear, he moved through the next
days, until Yolande was buried. Once the funeral was over and all
the mourners had left his house, he closed himself into his study
and, claiming he wanted to observe a period of quiet mourning,
refused to see anyone. Knowing how much he and Yolande had loved
each other, most of Piers’s friends did as he wished and left him
alone. Alain went to the house several times, only to be told that
Piers did not want to see anyone. After being repeatedly refused
admission he ceased to knock on the door of the building that had
once been like a second home to him. He decided he would give Piers
a bit of time, and then he would insist on seeing him.
*
* * * *
Six weeks after Yolande’s death, on a rainy
February night, Alain sat in his own house, reading the document
that had been delivered to him earlier that day. He had expected
it; indeed, he was surprised that it had not come sooner. Upon the
death of George of Antioch, Roger had appointed Philip of Mahdia to
lead the Sicilian navy. Philip was an excellent choice as the new
Emir al-Bahr, an honest and intelligent man, one of Roger’s most
able ministers, and Alain heartily approved of Roger’s decision.
Nor could Alain find aught to dispute in Philip’s wish to have his
own men as aides and high officers. In Philip’s place Alain would
have felt the same way.
And so on that rainy evening Alain sat
reading for the third time, with very mixed emotions, the document
that sent him into honorable retirement. There was no disgrace in
the wording of the letter, no hint that he ought to go into exile.
Alain still held all of his lands and honors and fine-sounding
titles. Except for those pertaining to the Sicilian navy; he was no
longer a part of the navy.
“
So, at
the age of thirty-eight, when most men are at the height of their
power, I have lost my career,” Alain muttered to himself, thinking
that wealth and empty titles would mean nothing without the
activity that had filled his life for seventeen busy years. Never
again would he sit with Roger and the other captains to plan
strategy, nor insist to a junior officer on the
right kind
or
the right amount of ship’s
stores. There would be no more pacing on deck while he searched the
horizon for the enemy’s sails. No more starry nights at sea, no
gut-wrenching terror before a battle. No victories. “I am an old
man now.”
There was a small mirror on the wall of his
private sitting room. Alain went to it, to stare at the reflection
of a handsome man with tanned skin that crinkled into lines around
his gray eyes, with curling dark brown hair just beginning to turn
white around his temples. His carefully trimmed beard and mustache
were lightly sprinkled with gray.
“An old man,” he repeated to himself, “with
honors and wealth and nothing to do.”
“
My
lord.” At the sound of his personal servant’s voice Alain turned
from the mirror.
“My
lord, there is a woman at the door who insists on seeing
you. She is too well-covered for me to discern if she is young or
old, so I cannot tell if she speaks the truth, but she claims to be
the daughter of the Baron of Ascoli. She has no attendants
w
ith her, so she may be lying.”
“I will soon find out who she is.” Picking up
the scroll, Alain began to re-roll it. “Bring her to me.”
The figure the servant conducted into the
room a few moments later was small and heavily cloaked and hooded.
With a tug at his heart, Alain recognized the cloak.
“Samira,” he said, “why are you wearing your
mother’s clothing? More importantly, why have you come to my house
without a maidservant?”
“Because I do not want anyone but you to know
where I am,” Samira answered, removing the cloak and shaking the
raindrops from it before laying it over a bench. “Most
particularly, I do not want my father to know I have come here. You
must promise not to tell him.”
“I think if Piers were to learn that you have
come to my house alone so late at night, even our old friendship
would not save me,” Alain said in a stern voice, deliberately
trying to impress upon her the seriousness of what she had
done.
“I have a good reason for coming here.”
Samira brushed aside Alain’s concern. “Aren’t you going to offer me
any wine?” She moved into the pool of light cast by the candle
Alain had been using.
Her hair
was smooth and shining black, pulled into a single thick braid that
hung halfway down her back. Her skin was the color of rich cream,
her cheeks lightly touched with rose, and her gray-green eyes
behind the dark fringe of lashes were cool and intelligent. She was
one month past her fifteenth birthday, on the threshold of a
glorious, as yet unawakened beauty. She glanced down at
the
scroll Alain had tossed onto a small
table, tapping the parchment with one slender
finger.
“The wine, Theo Alain? I am chilled.”
“
Serves
you right for coming out on a night like this.” But he gave her the
wine in a fine silver goblet, and she sippe
d at it as if she
really be
lieved it would warm
her. “Well, child? Why are you here?”
“I am not a child,” she said with exaggerated
dignity.
“You are to me and always will be. Now, if
you do not want me to turn you over my knee, explain yourself at
once. Then I can see you safely home.”
“Theo Alain.” Samira set down the wine goblet
beside the scroll. “I need your help.”
“For what?”
“For my father. Since Mama died he has locked
himself into his study.”
“I know. He won’t see me. I have tried, and
he refuses.” Alain thought with some guilt that he ought to have
tried harder and more often.
“He sits at his writing table all day,
staring out at Mama’s garden as if it was in full bloom,” Samira
said. “At night he goes upstairs to the room they shared, but I do
not think he sleeps. He does not look as though he sleeps.”
“He loved your mother very much. Perhaps he
needs more time to recover from her death.”
“Do you think I do not grieve for Mama? I
cried myself to sleep every night for weeks. But then I began to
understand that she would not want me to withdraw from life and
waste my days and nights in sorrow. I have begun to take over her
duties in the house. I go to church every day. I ride; I visit
friends. Even when I do not want to do these things I make myself
do them, because Mama would want me to, and because with each day
that passes it does grow just a little easier to do them.
“
But Papa
makes no effort to shake off his grief,” Samira said. “He is not at
all like my loving father an
ymore. He will not talk to me.
He does not eat. I am afraid he will die, too, of a broken
heart. Theo Alain, I cannot
lose both parents. I cannot!”
“Work is the best remedy for a broken heart,”
Alain said, speaking out of his own experience. “Perhaps if Piers
took up his duties for Roger again, that would help. I can speak to
Roger and ask him to send Piers on a new assignment. I understand
there has been some fighting near Ascoli; that ought to interest
him.”
“Don’t you dare suggest such a thing to
Roger! Or to Papa,” Samira cried. “If my father goes into battle in
his present mood, he will let himself be killed. Please, Theo
Alain, can’t you think of something to rouse him out of his grief?
Something exciting and challenging, perhaps even something far away
from Sicily, to distract him and occupy all his mind and his
energies?”
“You do present an interesting proposition,”
Alain said, his hand resting on the scroll from Philip of Mahdia.
“Your plea comes at a time when I am myself in need of
distraction.”
“Do you have an idea?” Samira looked at him
with such an expression of hope that Alain could not help but smile
at her.
“Indeed I have,” he said. “But I want to
think my plan through before I speak of it. Samira, would you be
good enough to invite me to eat with you and your father tomorrow
evening?”
“Of course.” Samira looked almost happy
again. “You are always welcome. I don’t think Papa will eat,
though. He will not even join me at the table to sit with me.”
“He will eat after he hears what I have to
say,” Alain promised.
“I never thought you would prove to be a
coward, Piers, but you have.” With the blackest scowl he could
muster and the aggressive stride that made men under his command
watch him in fear of his next move, Alain advanced into Piers’s
study, holding in one hand a rolled-up and tied piece of parchment.
Samira followed him into the room, looking first hopeful and then
apprehensive when she heard the way Alain was speaking to her
father.
“Are you going to sit there sulking forever?”
Alain rounded the end of the writing table to position himself in
such a way that he blocked the garden view. “Roger tells me you
have sent him a letter in which you resigned every post he has ever
given you. Is that what you worked so hard for during all of these
years? For the chance to slink away like the spineless coward you
are? Do you really believe that is what Yolande would have wanted
you to do?”