Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

So I sat there, mazed in that eternal contradiction of human kind, regret for the loss of what was never possessed. Tibald had come and carried her off to Jerusalem. When I was still two years from knighthood and the triumphs of the joust, she had lived as his wife in the fabled land of Outremer. Now she was free, but we were not equals now: she was an heiress, her family was among the richest in Apulia – and I, what was I? Thurstan Beauchamp, a man of public spectacles and private bribes, living on a palace stipend. What had I to offer? A man could not go to a lady such as she with for only quality the need to be rescued.

These things I knew. And yet, perversely, sitting there on my narrow stone bench against the wall in the deserted courtyard, I felt the stirring of hope within me. I was not yet thirty years old. If Yusuf rose in the King's favour, I would rise with him. He wished me well, he would not forget me; there was every chance that I would come into his place at the Diwan of Control. This too was a way of amassing wealth, though not the way I would have chosen.

But hope is a hound that once unleashed can change its nature even as it leaps. Perhaps there was another way. If Alicia and I could find again the feeling that once we had, perhaps we could recover the selves we once had too and the prospects that had belonged to those selves. We could help each other in this. There was no bar to my knighthood – I was descended from the Norman nobility of England; nor was there any bar to Alicia having the man of her choice. Then I could offer more than my need of rescue: I could be a rescuer in my turn. When she had spoken of Ascalon and the need to defend the land she held against the infidel I had seen myself on a war horse, in full splendour of arms, at the gallop. Of course, Yusuf, on whom I so much depended, was an infidel too…

At once exhilarated and confused by these thoughts, I rose from my bench with the intention of retracing my steps through the church and returning to the diwan and my scrutiny of the royal renewals. But even as I got to my feet I saw a man in monastic habit come out into the courtyard just as I had done. After a moment I recognised him. It was Gerbert, a Benedictine, who had come recently to Palermo as abbot at the Monastery of San Salvatore. He waited there some short while and was joined by another, who I knew slightly better, having met him on occasion, a Lombard of the minor nobility named Atenulf, a chamberlain in the Royal Diwan, of considerable influence, as it was said. The two men took some paces then stopped and stood together in what seemed close conversation. They glanced across the courtyard from time to time, but I was still in the shadow of the portico, and standing close against the wall, and so I think they did not see me.

Since I had not come forth from my place at once, I was unwilling to do so now, because of the seeming closeness of their talk. They would think I had been hiding there so as to observe them, and this suspicion would not have been unfounded; the palace service made spies of all who worked within it, and there was something in this colloquy that roused my curiosity. I wondered whether they had met by chance, and what might have brought them here. I thought Gerbert might have come to visit the Benedictine Abbey nearby. Perhaps Atenulf came to this church for his private devotions. But it had not looked like a chance meeting…

They stayed in talk for some minutes, then withdrew once more into the church, the Benedictine entering a little earlier than his companion. I waited some while longer, then did the same. There was no sign of either man in the body of the church.

Speculations about this meeting continued in my mind as I made my way back to the diwan, but they did not long survive my arrival there.

Stefanos was waiting for me, and the tailor, very peevish-looking now, was at his side.

"They will not have it," he said.

"Who is it that you are speaking of?"

"They, the dancers. They will not let themselves be touched. The tailor went there to take the measures. He says that if he had not started back she would have clawed him."

"Who? No, no need to tell me, I know who. That one has been a source of trouble to me since I first set eyes on her."

Immediately upon saying this I was conscious of some slight confusion, which I did not myself altogether understand, and it was not lessened by the knowledge that Stefanos had his eyes closely upon me. He is a mild man, as I have said, but there is not much that escapes his notice, and he is fond of me, as also his wife Maria, and that makes him notice all the more.

"Indeed, yes," was all he said now, but I seemed to detect some extra significance in the inflexion of his words.

"She was the worst," the tailor said, "but they were all three much the same, ridiculous creatures, I could not get near any of them, they seemed to think I wanted to put my hand up their skirts, what an idea, I have better things to do. The men just laughed."

"Perhaps they did not want to give the men cause for jealousy," Stefanos said. "They are simple people."

"But the worst one," I said, "she does not belong to either of the men."

"Does she not?"

"You know quite well she does not." I had a sudden memory of the white birds, that strange desolate wailing, Sigismond's face as he fought for breath, Nesrin's eyes on me, attentive, dispassionate. "She wanted a stable for herself, did she not?"

"I would like to say that I should never have been put to such a task," the tailor said. "I am His Majesty's second wardrobe attendant and the first is old now, his hands shake, it will not be long before I am stepping into his shoes. I tried only at the shoulders and waist, I did not embark on the hips or bosom, and would not do so now for any inducement, even if you promised me an armed guard".

"We will have to get a woman to come and do it," I said. "We cannot let them appear in the rags they are wearing now."

It was a practical solution, but it overlaid a vast astonishment on my part. These women had tramped the roads of Asia and Europe, dancing for men who clustered closely round them. Time and again they had revealed their bodies to strangers, either openly or by enticing suggestion. Yet they would not permit a tailor to lay the lightest of touches on them.

Could this fierceness be called chastity? A challenge it would be for a man to soften it… "This our world is full of marvels," I said to Stefanos. "You find a dressmaker. I will have to go with her, I suppose, to calm things down".

When I got there with the woman it was to find all five of them grouped together outside their quarters, in what had been the stable yard, talking eagerly together in the sunshine. Nesrin was in the midst. It had been almost a month since I had seen her last, but it seemed a much shorter time, though I did not know why this should be so.

Before the seamstress started her work I wanted to speak to them, to tell them that they should not be troublesome or difficult, as they had been with the tailor, but should try to help things forward, as this would make everything easier and work to their advantage. They would be performing at the court, before King Roger himself, and this would be a great honour, one they would be able to relate to their children in time to come.

I spoke slowly, in Greek as simple as I could make it, and they listened, or appeared to, though how much they understood I could not tell. Only Nesrin looked at me as I spoke, the others kept their faces turned from me, both the men and the women. They wore the expression I remembered from before in my dealings with them, sombre and brooding, not defiant or even indifferent, simply the look of their faces in repose. She, on the other hand, looked continuously and intently towards me, but not really as listening to my words, more as simply watching me as I talked, and this was strangely unsettling to me and impeded the ordering of my thoughts. Twice she smiled, not broadly but sufficiently to show the edges of her teeth, and I wondered even as I spoke what she did to keep them so white in the wandering conditions of her life, and these thoughts too made me falter a little in my speech, as did the fact that her smiles did not come at points which were intended by me to cause mirth – nothing of what I said was intended to cause mirth – so I had the feeling that it was something in me, in my face or person or manner of speaking, that caused her the smile.