Winter Song Read online

  In the privacy of the castellan’s chamber in Gordes, which Raymond had commandeered when he returned there two days earlier, he took out the letter he had received from Alys three weeks before. It was the letter of a good wife, devoted to her husband’s interests, Raymond thought as he reread it for the some-hundredth time, but it breathed duty, not love. He felt there was a coldness in those final words “all my duty, all my desire, my every thought is for your good”. Raymond closed his eyes. It was impossible that one act of stupid crudity could kill the love Alys had shown him.

  He did not believe it. Alys was too reasonable. She even admitted she had been at fault and had caused his explosion of temper, she had said so. Could she then withdraw her love? Raymond told himself it was impossible, yet all his life he had dealt with women who blew up a yawn or a sigh into a major offense and punished such offenses with coldness and rejection. Over and over he assured himself that Alys was not that sort, but that only woke a violent desire to go to her and prove it to himself.

  There was also the possibility that the seeming coldness of her letter was generated by fear, but that conclusion was not very helpful. It merely reinforced the urge to rush off to Arles. Unfortunately, this was the one thing Raymond knew he must not do until he learned what reaction Sir Romeo would have to the news that Alphonse had gone to King Louis. The intense frustration generated an enormous energy in Raymond, which was expended in a more thorough examination of the state of war readiness in Aix than had been experienced since the early years of Raymond-Berenger’s rule when he had come himself.

  Some of the older vassals and castellans who remembered those years, scratched their heads and muttered, unsure of whether to be glad or sorry. The total freedom they had enjoyed under Alphonse’s easy rule was obviously gone, but so was the indifference and neglect. Adding one thing with another, the men decided God had been watching over them. In the good years of peace after Toulouse’s downfall, they had done as they pleased. Now that trouble was coming, they were blessed with a strong leader.

  The general satisfaction and willingness to make ready for trouble soothed Raymond in one way but gave no further outlet to his need for action. He knew there was no profit in fighting one’s own men, and he picked no quarrels. Still, he was so uneasy that some rebellion would almost have pleased him better than the compliance with which he was met. He returned to Aix and put the guard and armorers to such labor that they fell, like dead men into their beds, when they were allowed to seek them. But he dared not stay long at Aix. If Sir Romeo sent a second command to come to Arles, he did not wish to be in Aix to receive it. On the other hand, if Alys should soften and decide to write, he wanted her letter. Thus, he went to Gordes, since it was the place she had last known him to be.

  Raymond thought so little of Lucie that it was not until he sat rereading Alys’s old letter that he remembered why he had come to Gordes in the first place. He cursed wearily, wondering if he should leave, but Gordes had another prime advantage, there was a road, not good or well traveled, but negotiable by a troop of mounted men, going almost directly to Arles. For some time he sat staring into nothing. He had been celibate as a saint since he left Alys, which was ridiculous, a self-imposed penance. Then he laughed without mirth, thinking that Alys would never believe him if he told her. And would she even care?

  As if in answer to that question, the castellan appeared in the doorway. “There is a letter from Arles, my lord, sent on from Aix.”

  “The seal?” Raymond asked, although what he could do if the letter was from Sir Romeo, he did not know.

  “I do not know it.”

  “Alys!” Raymond exclaimed, more because it was what he wanted than for any other reason.

  The desire was fulfilled, it was Alys’s seal with the arms of Marlowe. He skipped the salutation and began with the words “I dare address you so boldly because”, and his heart sank. Raymond closed his eyes, but when they opened they fell on the preceding line and he was so instantly filled with joy that he had to close his jaw hard to keep from crying out in relief. He should have begun at the beginning.

  “To Lord Raymond d’Aix, my dear lord and husband”, Alys wrote, adding to that formal beginning, “my dearest and most precious love”. That was the boldness for which she had begged pardon. Raymond took a deep breath, restrained himself from reading the lines ten times, and got to the meat of the letter.

  I dare address you so boldly because my news is so good that I hope your joy in it will lead you to forgive such freedom in a wife so imperfect. Today we have had letters from your father in France. I enclose herein his short message to me. From it I understand that Louis has either accepted his homage for Aix or has given him surety that he would do so as soon as circumstances permit. Moreover, I suppose that if Louis desired Lord Alphonse to remain with him, it can only mean that he intends your father to accompany his envoy or to carry for him to Lady Beatrice an offer for young Beatrice.

  Although this deduction hardly required great perspicacity, Raymond smiled as fondly as if Alys had written a sentence worthy of the judgment of Solomon. At the next, his smile broadened.

  Thus, I believe it safe now, if your work among the vassals be finished, to come here. You must do what you know to be best, but for myself nothing could be more desirable. I must not write more lest I forget my duty and urge you to forget yours, so greatly do I desire to see you.

  “The clever little witch,” Raymond muttered to himself, having noted the date and relished the tender closing.

  At the moment no new doubts had yet entered Raymond’s mind. He recognized only Alys’s overt purpose. Plainly, from the hesitancy of the first lines, she still feared some punishment. Her first defense had been to include his father’s brief letter to her with its “treasure of my house”. Modesty would forbid her to quote the lines, so she had sent the note. Her second line of defense was to urge him to come to her. Alys knew he would find it difficult to exact any punishment in the crowded conditions of Arles without raising comment and exposing more of his private affairs than he would wish. Probably she hoped to soften him enough over the time spent in a guesting situation that he would consider whatever scolding he could find time and place to deliver as sufficient lessoning.

  Raymond chuckled softly and stretched until his bones cracked, feeling loose and relaxed for the first time since he had entered Tour Dur nearly a month before. He was warm and amused, very eager to see Alys, but without the feverish feeling of urgency that made him constantly miserable when he felt he had lost her love. He wished the letter had arrived earlier so that he could have started that day, but he was not furious with impatience that it was too late to go. After sitting for a while, looking comfortably into the fire and chuckling now and again as he thought of various ways of teasing and alarming his properly remorseful wife, he went to tell the castellan that he would leave at dawn.

  Just before he gave the order Raymond paused, suddenly feeling uneasy and wondering whether there might be any other reason for Alys to urge him to come to Arles, a political reason she did not wish to state. If so, the few hours, that is, whether he arrived in Arles at daybreak rather than at evening, might make a difference. Then he remembered the frank discussion of his father’s purpose in going to Louis. If she feared her letter would be opened, she would never have written that. Raymond gave the original order he had intended and put the uneasiness he felt out of his mind.

  It so happened that Raymond’s arrival at Arles at dawn would have saved everyone there a period of great anxiety, but it could not have averted the trouble that overtook Alys because that had happened before he received her letter. When Alys finished writing it and had sent it off with one of the men from Tour Dur, she felt particularly lighthearted. She had, indeed, planned just what Raymond had deduced, but what made her happy was the thought of seeing Raymond, not escaping punishment.

  The fact that she was free of Lady Jeannette’s sighs, tears, and constant demands and complaints not only increa
sed her cheerfulness but also enabled her to seek an outlet for it. For the first time since Raymond-Berenger had been interred, Alys sought out the younger group of guests. She was welcomed with pleasure by Beatrice and with stares and in-drawn breaths of admiration from the young men. They had scarcely caught a glimpse of her previously, since most of them sedulously avoided the knot of older women.

  “Thou lily-white, sweet lady, bright of brow. How sweeter than a grape art thou,” one of the young men sighed.

  Alys’s eyes opened as wide as possible, bright blue pools dramatically surrounded with overlong, dark gold lashes. “How did you know?” she asked, sounding astounded. “I do not even know your name, and here you are blabbing my secrets all over the place.”

  “It cannot be a secret that thou art sweet as a grape, lily-white, or bright of brow. That can be seen at one glance,” the young man said with determined admiration, although one could see that he was a trifle put out by being interrupted before he finished his poem.

  “The grapes where I come from are tarter than crabapples,” Alys said, “but that was not what I meant. If I am unwelcome to you, it would be sufficient to turn your back and not speak to me. There was no need to quote at me lines from which I fled more than two hundred leagues.”

  “W-what?” the poor young man stammered. He had met various responses to flattery, but this one was totally new.

  “Oh, did you not know?” Alys asked innocently. “Then I beg your pardon. I see you meant no offense. I have these crochets. I am driven nearly to madness when lips are likened to strawberries or necks to those of swans…” Here Alys paused and cocked her head to the side. “Although,” she continued, “there would be some sense in that, you know. Only think how convenient it would be if one’s neck could stretch up an arm’s length and then bend down and turn right around so that one could see the small of one’s back.”

  For perhaps two heartbeats there was a stunned silence. Then Alys slowly and deliberately lowered one lid in an exaggerated wink. It was too much for another of the young men, who burst into laughter, and then the whole group followed. Alys now went and apologized prettily to the gentleman who had first spoken to her.

  “I did not mean to raise laughter at your cost,” she said. “I know it is a dreadful lack in me, but I am not in the least poetical. When someone says to me ‘Take thou my hand’, I see myself carrying away his hand, and I wonder what in the world I am going to do with it.”

  “Does it never occur to you that the hand is attached to the man?” asked the gentleman who had first laughed, adding, “I am Raymond de Villeneuve.”

  “And I am Alys d’Aix. As to what you said, it does not seem to have occurred to poets that a man cannot be cut up. They are forever offering you pieces of their anatomy—a heart, a tongue, a liver—although what good the poet would be without the part puzzles me. Also, it would be very messy to be carrying around a dripping heart or an oozing liver, and I think the tongue would soon dry out and look quite unlike itself and horrid.”

  The group around Alys was by now convulsed with mirth, the men whooping with laughter and the girls tittering into their sleeves. Beatrice laughed so hard she hiccupped, but Guillaume des Baux, who had been standing closest to Beatrice, turned on Alys with a scowl.

  “Your heart is hard, madame, if you cannot feel for the suffering of a hopeless lover,” he said.

  Alys’s fair brows rose. “My heart, sir, is a red, ugly thing just as any woman’s is, no harder, no softer. If you wish to blame me with justice, rather say my temper is risible or my thoughts suspicious. That is, I like to laugh and I do not believe anyone ever died of love. It is quite remarkable to me how blooming and healthy sighing swains remain, except in their verses or tales.”

  “You wrong us, Lady Alys,” Sir Guillaume said. “Men have died for love.”

  “Oh, yes, and women, too,” Alys agreed. “Outraged husbands have killed wives and lovers, outraged women have killed poets who whispered in one ear while their eyes sought another victim. I said no man or woman had died of love.”

  “Who has wronged you that you are so bitter, Lady Alys?” Guillaume asked nastily.

  Guillaume des Baux was very angry. In a few words, Alys seemed to have destroyed the delicate structure of romance he had been building around Beatrice. First she had laughed as heartily as—more heartily than—any of the other ladies when Alys poked fun at lovers, and then her expression had grown quite hard when Alys spoke of crimes of passion. Had Guillaume not been seduced by his own verses so that he had convinced himself that he was in love with Beatrice, he would not have been so clumsy. He had lashed out with the hope of embarrassing the sharp-tongued lady, but he should have been warned by the quickness of her repartee that she was unlikely to fall into so obvious a trap.

  Alys widened her eyes to their full extent. “But sir,” she protested, “do you take me for corrupt from the cradle? Or do you suggest that Queen Eleanor has so little control over the damsels entrusted to her care that I could come to such harm while under her eye? Or is it my mother-by-marriage you impugn?”

  Poor Guillaume, not expecting such a flood of accusations, merely gaped, and Alys changed her expression from astonished indignation to one of merriment.

  “No, no,” she cried, “you must be punished for so evil a calumny. I name you to be hoodman blind.”

  A slight tension that had developed in the group in expectation of a quarrel dissolved into laughter. Alys had broken the romantic mood with her joking, and everyone was in the right humor for a lively game. Raymond de Villeneuve stepped forward swiftly and drew the hood of Guillaume’s tunic over his head and down to his chin, obscuring his vision. Beatrice jumped up from her chair and began to turn her swain round and round so he would lose all sense of direction. The other young men hastily carried whatever furniture there was in the area to the walls. Finally Beatrice gave Guillaume a hard shove, which sent him staggering into the center of the hall.

  “I do not wish—” Guillaume began furiously, intending to say he did not wish to play silly games.

  He reached to lift the hood that blinded him, but someone pushed him strongly from the rear, and Beatrice cried out that he should not be so poor a sport. That remark sounded a warning, even through Guillaume’s fury. He might not have been a very experienced lover, but he realized that showing himself ill-humored and spiteful, unable to take a jest when it was turned on him, would certainly not inspire admiration in any lady, especially Beatrice. So he swallowed his rage as well as he could and played the game.

  He was soon rewarded for his compliance. Beatrice believed that it was for her sake, so that she should not seem foolish, that Guillaume had been so angry when Alys made the group laugh at lovers. Beatrice also suspected that Guillaume was more serious than she about the game of love they were playing. Because her conscience pricked her, she deliberately did not dodge quickly enough when the hoodman came in her direction, and he caught her.

  This was only the first stage of the game. Now the hoodman needed to identify the person he had caught. If he could do so, that person would take his place as hoodman and the game would begin anew. It was not at all difficult to identify Beatrice. She was wearing a gown with a decorative edging of fur and an intricate necklace, yet Guillaume held her in his arms for quite five minutes, praising her sweet scent and the contours of her body and face, over which he kept running his fingers, before he finally gave her name and released her.

  Alys did not think much about this immediately, although she had noticed Beatrice’s delay. The first might have been owing to a distraction of attention. Guillaume’s actions were only natural, for all young men seized the opportunity to touch and embrace a lady if they caught one. That was a good measure of the attraction the game held for adults, plus the rough joy of pushing and striking the hoodman. It was only after Beatrice had been blinded and was being pushed about—albeit a good deal more gently than Guillaume had been—that it became clear to Alys there was some specia
l relationship between them.

  Raymond de Villeneuve was holding Guillaume out of the crowd surrounding the blindfolded Beatrice and saying, “Oh, no. You must stand clear. You will let her catch you and be hoodman again just for the pleasure of having her touch you.” No wonder, Alys thought, he was furious at me for making Beatrice laugh at love poems. She was amused and a little sorry for the young man. Poor thing, he might believe himself to be in love with Beatrice even though both must know any real relationship to be impossible. Still, that could be dangerous. Beatrice was very young, and it was possible she might be infected by the tender sentiment. It would not make any difference in what happened, but it could make her very unhappy.

  Absorption in such subjects is not the best method for playing a game. Slowed by her abstraction, Alys was Beatrice’s victim. She, too, was easy to recognize because she was so small. Laughing, she complained vociferously of being caught in her own trap and complained that the odds against her were unfair because she did not know the names of most of the group. However, by clever strategy she caught Raymond de Villeneuve. There was considerable laughter and many jests about how she had pursued him, encouraged by his loud assertions of his willingness to be pursued by Alys at any time she chose. Eventually these were muffled by his hood, and the game went on. Alert now, Alys avoided recapture but also found confirmation that Guillaume was wooing Beatrice. More important, it did not seem to Alys that Beatrice was fleeing more ardently than coyness suggested. Alys was concerned, but she made, as yet, no obvious attempts to separate the pair, restraining herself to a seemingly accidental interruption now and again. However, even drawing Beatrice away to advise on a new headdress or to choose between two colors of embroidery thread was unwise. Coupled with Alys’s previous jests at the expense of lovers and the admiration Beatrice showed for her, Alys’s attempts to fix Beatrice’s attention on activities that did not include Guillaume took on a sinister light in his eyes.