‘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 noon meal. To my joy, Hugh told me that Robin had arranged that I should become Bernard’s pupil. The Frenchman would also take over as my language teacher from Hugh, as I was far more advanced than the other students, and Bernard had also been charged with giving me lessons in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy . . . and music. I was ecstatic, bubbling with happiness: I would spend all afternoon listening to wonderful music, and learning how to make it myself, and, best of all, I would be away from Guy and Will for hours at a time.
I found Bernard in the small cottage he had been given about half a mile from Thangbrand’s farmstead in a small clearing in the greenwood. I walked there on air, dizzy with joy at my prospects, mingled with some trepidation: would I prove worthy of this great man? Hugh had let slip that separate living quarters had been a condition of Bernard’s acceptance of the job as my tutor. He was a fastidious man, Hugh said, and he would not sleep in the hall with all the other flea-bitten outlaws.
He did not look particularly fastidious when I encountered him that fine early autumn afternoon, to present myself as his pupil. He was slumped on an up-ended sawn-off log outside the semi-derelict cottage; his tunic, the fine silk one from yesterday’s performance, was only half buttoned, and had what looked like dried vomit down the front. He had lost one of his shoes and, as he strummed his vielle with his fingers, he giggled softly to himself, swaying on his seat. The day before I had seen him a God-like figure, courtly lover, master of music, creator of beauty: today he was ridiculous.
‘Master Bernard,’ I said in French, standing in front of him as he sat there head drooped over his vielle, fingering the strings. ‘I am Alan Dale, and I have come to present myself to you as a pupil at the orders of my master, Robert Odo . . .’
‘Shhhhhh . . .’ he slurred at me, wagging a finger rapidly in my general direction. ‘I am creating a masterpiece.’
He amused himself on the vielle, playing little ripples of music and occasionally appearing to nod off for a few moments, before jerking awake. I stood there for perhaps a quarter of an hour and then he looked up and said clearly: ‘Who are you?’
I repeated: ‘I am Alan, your pupil, and I have come to serve you at the orders—’
He interrupted me: ‘Serve me, eh, serve me? Well, you can bring me some more wine, then.’
I hesitated, but he waved me away shouting: ‘Wine, wine, decent wine, go on, boy, go on, go on, go on . . .’ So I went back to Thangbrand’s, stole a small cask of wine from the buttery when nobody was looking, brought it back on a barrow. Then I helped him to drink it.
As my tutor in arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, Bernard was a disaster. In fact, as I remember, he never even mentioned the subjects. But he did improve my French, as it was all we spoke together, and he did teach me music, God be praised: he taught me how to construct
cansos
and
sirventes
, love songs and satirical poems, how to tune and play the vielle, how to extend my voice, to control my breathing and many more technical tricks of his trade. He was a troubadour, or more properly, since he came from northern France, a
trouvère
, and his joy, he told me, was to play and sing for the great princes of Europe; to sing of love; the love of a humble knight for a high-born lady, to sing of
l’amour courtois
, courtly love, the love of a
servus
for his
domina
. . .
That afternoon, as we drank the wine, and I scrubbed the dried vomit off his tunic with a brush, he told me his life’s story. He was born in the county of Champagne, the second son of a minor baron, who served Henry, the count. He had loved music from an early age, but his father, who did not care much for music or for Bernard, had disapproved. However, bullied by Bernard’s mother, he had arranged for his training with one of the greatest
trouvères
in France, and had found him a place at the court of King Louis. From the first, Bernard confided in me, he was an enormous success - great ladies wept openly at his love songs, everyone guffawed at his witty
sirvantes
, which mocked court life but never went too far. Louis had showered him with gold and jewels. Everybody loved him; life was good; and for a
gentil
young man of fine looks but no fortune there was the hope of a good marriage to one of the plainer ladies of the court. It was a glittering life: hunting parties, royal feasts, poetry games and singing competitions. But, like many a young buck before him, Bernard over-reached himself. For, as well as a deep adoration of music, he also loved, and almost to the same extent, wine and women - and it was this last pleasure that had led to his downfall.
Bernard - young, handsome, funny and talented - was very popular with the ladies of the court. Several ladies, married and unmarried, had admitted him to their bedchambers, but he had kept his lovemaking light and retained his freedom from commitment to any one lover. But then he fell in love. He was utterly bewitched by the young and lovely Héloïse de Chaumont, wife of the ageing Enguerrand, Sire de Chaumont, a noted warrior much esteemed for his
preux
or prowess on the battlefield by King Louis.
‘Ah, Alan, my boy, she was perfect, she was beauty made flesh,’ Bernard told me, and his face gave a little twist of pain. ‘Hair like corn, huge violet eyes, a slender waist swelling to generous curves . . .’ Here Bernard made the usual gesture with his hands. ‘How I loved her. I would have died for her - well not died, but certainly I would happily have suffered a great deal of pain for her. Well, not a
great
deal of pain, some pain. Let’s just say a small amount of discomfort . . . Ah, Héloïse; she was the very air in my lungs, the breath of my life.’ He took a huge gulp of wine and wiped away an oily tear. ‘And she loved me, Alan, she truly loved me, too.’
For several weeks the lovers enjoyed a passionate affair and then, inevitably, Enguerrand discovered them.
The Sire de Chaumont had been out hunting with a royal party in the woods around Paris. His horse had become lame early in the morning and so he had returned, unexpectedly, to his apartments in the palace, thinking that he might return to bed and enjoy a little sport with his young wife instead. He entered his wife’s bedchamber to discover Bernard naked and with an enormous erection striding up and down in front of Héloïse’s bed, playing his vielle and reciting a scurrilous ditty about the King. The lady, also naked, was in fits of hysterical laughter when Enguerrand burst through the door. Unfortunately, the Sire de Chaumont had also removed his clothing and he too was in a state of obvious arousal. Then Héloïse did the wrong thing, she carried on laughing. She looked at the two naked men, one young, one old, both now with fast-shrinking erections, and she howled with laughter.
‘Of course, there was no comparison,’ Bernard informed me with pride. ‘He might have been a lion on the battlefield but, for the bedchamber, he was equipped like a baby shrew.’ Both men left the chamber at speed. Bernard grabbed his clothes and was out of the window in a couple of heartbeats. Enguerrand retreated to the antechamber to collect his dignity and summon his men-at-arms.
‘It was not funny, Alan,’ said Bernard sternly, as the tears rolled down my cheeks. ‘It all ended very sadly. The Sire de Chaumont had Héloïse beheaded - really, in this day and age, beheaded for adultery - and he challenged me to single combat; and when I refused - I only like to wield my sword in bed - he sent his assassins to murder me. My father said he could not help me; I only escaped with my life by fleeing France and coming to this miserable rain-drenched island. And - can you believe it? - he pursued me even here! He has set a bounty on my head of fifty marks and had his noble friends in England declare me outlaw, me Bernard de Sézanne, the greatest musician in France,
un hors-la-loi
.’ He fell silent, pitying himself, and so I poured him another cup of wine.
Every afternoon, after the midday meal, I would walk out to Bernard’s cottage and we would explore music. It was a wonderful time and I learnt more about life and love and music and passion in those few months than I had learnt in my whole life. It was an escape from the grind of Thangbrand’s, but only a temporary one. I had to return each evening to the hall and the petty bullying of Guy and Will. Wilfred had gone: packed off to an abbey in Yorkshire. Robin had arranged it. But Wilfred’s departure meant little to me; he had never been a real part of my world, more like a ghost drifting through the human world awaiting his call to a more spiritual life. Apart from my few hours each day with Bernard, life at Thangbrand’s seemed flat, unchanging: chores, dull meals, battle practice, more chores . . . and long hours trying to sleep in the hall while the men-at-arms snored about me.
But, despite appearances, things were changing. For one, my body was changing: I was growing taller, and the battle practice was filling my thin frame with muscle; hairs appeared in private places on my body and my voice cracked and wavered, sometimes in a girlish pipe, sometimes a masculine growl. Bernard thought this was very funny, and would imitate my squeaking and booming. But in our singing lessons he began to teach me the male parts of songs. I was becoming a man, physically, at least. And when we practised swordplay on the exercise yard I remembered the blond man I had killed, and squared my shoulders, and scowled at Guy across the rim of my shield. I still ended up in the dust, of course.