Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

He is too light a man for me; not in weight certainly, but in gravitas. This is an infliction, a madness wreaked on me by a garden in springtime and his unsuspected kindness. Or because I am desolate just now. It will pass; it has to pass.

He was talking with animation about Henry II. “I am the king’s man in all things. Today his tax collector, tomorrow-whatever he wants me to be.” He turned to her. “Who was Simon of Naples? What did he do?”

“He was…” Adelia tried to gather her wits “Simon? Well…he worked secretly for the King of Sicily, among others.” She clenched her hands-he must not see that they trembled; he must not see that. She concentrated. “He told me once that he was analogous to a doctor of the incorporeal, a mender of broken situations.”

“A fixer. ‘Don’t worry, Simon of Naples will see to it.’”

“Yes. I suppose that is what he was.”

The man beside her nodded, and because she was now furiously interested in who he was, in everything about him, she understood that he, too, was a fixer and that the King of England had said in his Angevin French, “Ne vous en faites pas, Picot va tout arranger.”

“Strange, isn’t it,” the fixer said now, “that the story begins with a dead child.”

A royal child, heir to the throne of England and the empire his father had built for him. William Plantagenet, born to King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1153. Died 1156.

Rowley: “Henry doesn’t believe in crusade. Turn your back, he says, and while you’re away, some bastard’ll steal your throne.” He smiled. “Eleanor does, however; she went on one with her first husband.”

And had created a legend still sung throughout Christendom-though not in churches-and brought to Adelia’s mind images of a bare-breasted Amazon blazing her naughty progress across desert sands, trailing Louis, the poor, pious king of France, in her wake.

“Young as he was, the child William was forward and had vowed he would go on crusade when he grew up. They even had a little sword made for him, Eleanor and Henry, and after the boy died, Eleanor wanted it taken to the Holy Land.”

Yes, Adelia thought, touched. She had seen many such pass through Salerno, a father carrying his son’s sword, a son his father’s, on their way to Jerusalem on vicarious crusade as a result of a penance or in response to a vow, sometimes their own, sometimes that of their dead, which had been left unfulfilled.

Perhaps a day or so ago she would not have been so moved, but it was as if Simon’s death and this new, unsuspected passion had opened her to the painful loving of all the world. How pitiable it was.

Rowley said, “For a long time the king refused to spare anybody; he held that God would not refuse Paradise to a three-year-old child because he hadn’t fulfilled a vow. But the queen wouldn’t let it rest and so, what was it, nearly seven years ago now, I suppose, he chose Guiscard de Saumur, one of his Angevin uncles, to take the sword to Jerusalem.”

Again, Rowley grinned. “Henry always has more than one reason for what he does. Lord Guiscard was an admirable choice to take the sword: strong, enterprising, and acquainted with the East, but hot-tempered like all Angevins. A dispute with one of his vassals was threatening peace in the Anjou, and the king felt that Guiscard’s absence for a while would allow the matter to calm down. A mounted guard was to go with him. Henry also felt that he should send a man of his own with Guiscard, a wily fellow with diplomatic skills, or, as he put it, ‘Someone strong enough to keep the bugger out of trouble.’”

“You?” Adelia asked.

“Me,” Rowley said smugly. “Henry knighted me at the same time because I was to be the sword carrier. Eleanor herself strapped it to my back, and from that day until I returned it to young William’s tomb, it never left me. At night, when I took it off, I slept with it. And so we all set off for Jerusalem.”

The place’s name overcame the garden and the two people in it, filling the air with the adoration and agony of three inimical faiths, like planets humming their own lovely chords as they hurtled to collide.

“ Jerusalem,” Rowley said again, and his words were those of the Queen of Sheba: “Behold, the half was not told me.”

As a man entranced, he had trodden the stones made sacred by his Savior, shuffled on his knees along the Via Dolorosa, prostrated himself, weeping, at the Holy Sepulchre. It had seemed good to him, then, that this navel of all virtue should have been cleansed of heathen tyranny by the men of the First Crusade so that Christian pilgrims should once more be able to worship it as he worshipped. He had floundered in admiration for them.

“Even now I don’t know how they did it.” He was shaking his head, still wondering. “Flies, scorpions, thirst, the heat-your horse dies under you, just touching your damned armor blisters your hands. And they were outnumbered, ravaged by disease. No, God the Father was with those early crusaders, else they could never have recaptured His Son’s home. Or that’s what I thought then.”

There were other, profane pleasures. The descendants of the original crusaders had come to terms with the land they called Outremer; indeed, it was difficult to distinguish between them and the Arabs whose style of living they now imitated.

The tax collector described their marble palaces, courtyards with fountains and fig trees, their baths-“I swear to you, great Moorish baths sunk into the floor”-and the rich, pungent scent of seduction drenched the little garden.

Rowley, particularly, of all his group of knights, had been bewitched, not just by the outlandish, exotic holiness of the place but by its diffusion and complexity. “That’s what you don’t expect-how tangled it all is. It’s not plain Christian against plain Saracen, nothing as straightforward as that. You think, God bless, that man’s an enemy because he worships Allah. And, God bless, that fellow kneeling to a cross, he’s a Christian, he must be on our side-and he is a Christian, but he isn’t necessarily on your side, he’s just as likely to be in alliance with a Moslem prince.”

That much Adelia knew. Italian merchant-venturers had traded happily with their Moslem counterparts in Syria and Alexandria long before Pope Urban called for the deliverance of the Holy Places from Mohammedan rule in 1096, and they had cursed the crusade to hell then and cursed again in 1147, when men of the Second Crusade went into the Holy Land once more with no more understanding than their predecessors had had of the human mosaic they were invading, thus disrupting a profitable cooperation that had existed for generations between differing faiths.

As Rowley described a mélange that had delighted him, Adelia was alarmed at how the last of her defenses against him crumbled. Always one to categorize, quick to condemn, she was finding in this man a breadth of perception rare in crusaders. Don’t, don’t. This infatuation must be dispelled; it is necessary for me not to admire you. I do not wish to fall in love.

Unaware, Rowley went on. “At first I was amazed that Jew and Moslem were as ardent in their attachment to the Holy Temple as I was, that it was equally holy to them.” While he did not allow the realization to put a creep of doubt into his mind about the rightness of the crusading cause-“that came later”-he nevertheless began to find distasteful the loud, bullying intolerance of most of the other newcomers. He preferred the company and way of life of crusaders who were descendants of crusaders and who had accommodated themselves to its melting pot. Thanks to their hospitality, the aristocratic Guiscard and his entourage were able to enjoy it.