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 Gascons speaking it to each other, although they had always addressed me in bad French. I found that I could almost make out the sense of the words, if I concentrated; it was similar to French, but much of the meaning escaped me. But it was Eleanor’s native language, the language of the troubadours.
Then Marie-Anne spoke again, in French: ‘May I present Godifa, an orphan of good family from Nottinghamshire, who is under my protection, and Alan Dale, an honest Englishman and the personal jongleur to Bernard de Sezanne.’ This was news to me. I’d never in a thousand years have described myself as honest, but I felt proud to be called a jongleur, which was a professional entertainer, a man who often combined singing other people’s musical compositions with dancing, juggling, even telling amusing stories. It was ranked lower than a trouvere, who would, of course, ‘find’ or compose his own music. But to be the personal jongleur to Bernard sounded a lot better than the bag-carrier and bottlebringer that I actually was. I stood a little straighter and then bowed low to Eleanor who regarded me with a faint smile.
‘Now come, child,’ the Queen said to Marie-Anne, ‘and tell me of your adventures in the wild wood. And, in a little while, Monsieur de Sezanne will entertain us with some of his famous music.’ She smiled at Bernard and he bowed again. Then she sat down and Marie-Anne pulled up a stool and the two women were soon deep in conversation; the rest of us, it would seem, had been dismissed.
I looked around the gathering at the elegant knights and ladies, talking merrily, flirting and ignoring us. Bernard took the vielle from me, muttering something about checking the tuning. He wandered off into a corner and began fiddling with the pegs in the head of the instrument. Goody, completely unselfconsciously, sat down on the floor by Marie-Anne’s knee to listen to the conversation between the Queen and her protegee. I was left alone. And I had absolutely no idea what to do. A servant passed with a tray of hot honeyed wine and I grabbed a cup and hid my face in the sweet red liquid, taking tiny sips as I surveyed the company.
The men were dressed in a bewildering variety of styles from the dark woollen robes of clergymen to the bright silks of courtiers, with here and there a knight in chain mail. Even in my smart new green silk tunic, I felt out of place. I had a nagging fear in some part of my mind that one of these fine ladies and gentlemen would see me for what I really was: a grubby thief from Nottingham, and everyone would point and laugh, before I was dragged away to be hanged as an impostor.
One of the soldiers in the party throng, a big man with a bushy black beard, was dressed particularly severely in mail from head to foot, over which he wore a pure white surcoat with a large red cross on the breast. He was talking to two other men, both knights wearing identical gorgeous surcoats of scarlet and gold. As I looked at the knight in white, he must have felt my gaze and he turned away from the two men and looked directly at me. To my surprise, his strong black-bearded face split into a huge white grin and he shouted: ‘Alan! By the Cross, it’s Alan Dale!’ and he strode over to me holding out his arms in welcome. It was Sir Richard at Lea, whom I had last seen at Thangbrand’s, and in this crowd of elegant strangers, I was as glad to see him as I was surprised.
‘Where did you spring from?’ he asked, embracing me. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been pardoned?’