The Long Sword(13)
No one even mentioned the Turks.
Juan was attacked. It began to seem as if we were being targeted.
Anne told me that the Bishop of Cambrai was intending to have a magnificent audience with the Pope. ‘He thinks he will command the crusade,’ she whispered to me.
‘Who the hell is he?’ I asked. I suspect I nuzzled her neck or tried to move on to other matters.
‘The Count of Geneva’s son, the Count of Savoy’s nephew …’ She shrugged, which made her nipples move against my chest, and we moved on from church politics to other matters.
Another day of carrying messages for Father Pierre, and Anne told me we were to have an audience with the Pope. She laughed as she shrugged out of her shift. ‘Do other girls talk about leaves and flowers and poetry?’ she asked. ‘I feel I have gone from being your light of love to your spy.’
Of course I assured her of my ardour.
She shrugged. ‘You’ll leave me soon enough,’ she said. ‘Your Father Pierre has an audience with the Pope. May I tell you something serious? Your Father Pierre … people love him. But no one in Avignon can imagine how he has come to win the Pope’s ear.’ She leaned over me. ‘Would you – could you – arrange for him to bless me?’
The path of love and lechery is never a straight one.
The next afternoon, I took a pair of scrolls to the Carmelite house, and another across the city to one of the Roman cardinals. I knew I was followed, and I was growing very careful. When I returned to the Hospital, I had time with Father Pierre. We prayed together, and he showed me a meditation that I still use with my beads, and then he asked me if I wished to confess.
I am a poor liar. It is one of my best virtues, I think. I confessed Anne, and begged him to shrive her.
He shrugged. ‘I would bless her soul for her own sake, but for yours I will demand that you not sin with her again,’ he said. He didn’t smile, but there was a smile in his voice. ‘The sins of the young,’ he said softly.
On the eleventh of June, we were summoned to the papal palace for an audience with the Pope – Urban II, a French Benedictine whom I have mentioned before.
The last time I’d had an audience with the Pope, I’d stood in a dull brown cote and clean hose and had tried to listen to what my betters discussed while I looked at the wonders of the ceiling over my head and the rich frescoes on the walls.
Since then, I’d been to Italy and seen enough frescoes to dull the edge of my wonder. And men in their twenties are critical of everything; I was, by then, a hardened man of the world, and I looked at the frescoes with less awe and more judgement.
A pity. The awe was more worthy. I have the knowledge to judge a lance strike, a sword thrust, or the placement of a battery of gonnes, but I’ve never painted a stroke.
This time, I stood in the Pope’s audience chamber in harness, with the red surcoat adorned with the white cross over my armour, and a small shield with my own coat-armour in the right quadrant: a knight-volunteer of the Order. I wore gold spurs and a gold belt of plaques and a sword. I’m quite sure that I looked very fine, perhaps finer than Fra Peter, whose scarlet surcoat had seen more wear and who eschewed the earthly vanity of a gold belt. I was not as splendid as Lord Grey, and Miles Stapleton rivalled me, but that only meant that our party looked martial and, at least in my memory, puissant. Sister Marie-Therese wore black, as did the two priests of Father Pierre’s entourage, one Scottish Hospitaller priest, Father Hector, and one Italian, Father Maurice.
And then there was Fiore, in his plain harness and red coat. But we’d brushed him and mended him and I’d put him in my second-best doublet, and his golden hair made him look like a military saint.