His face fell. In fact, it didn’t just fall – it collapsed like an undermined stone tower.
It’s a small thing, for a man who has killed. You’d think I was hardened to it, but I had been with the Order for more than a year, and the collapse of his face, the twitch of his mouth – it was as if I’d kicked him.
I promise you, I didn’t think of it at the time. I was so furious that I almost missed my mounting, and when I was up I found that I’d left my arming sword with the door ward. Fuming, I had to dismount and reclaim it.
He bowed. ‘The king’s had a hard day,’ he said, in good French.
I considered a nasty reply, and thank God I bit my tongue and acted the part of a knight. I nodded, forced a smile, and bowed.
But between getting our own inn, finding our clothes and bribing a pair of maids to iron our things – we couldn’t get back before darkness fell.
Nerio finally put a hand on my arm. ‘Sir William,’ he said carefully, ‘I am going for a glass of wine and some beef. I recommend that you do the same.’ He didn’t wait for my expostulations, either, but took Fiore by the shoulder – took Fiore, for the love of the good Jesu; Fiore, who he affected to despise – and left our rooms and went to the head of the inn stairs without looking back at me. Fiore went with him willingly enough.
I suppose I had given them a difficult afternoon. In fact, I had behaved badly – disappointment and humiliation bring out the worst in most of us. I was left with Marc-Antonio. He kept his head down and kept laying out clothes and trying to boss the maids, who ignored him and went back and forth, heating their irons in a box by the fire. The box, of course, kept soot off the irons so that they were clean.
I still didn’t apologise. I sat there, my black mood further darkened by the abandonment of my friends, until the maids lit tapers and I smelled the beautiful smell of resin in the torches. The smell woke me from my mood, and I went down and ate, but my companions were scarcely civil. Twice, Fiore looked at me in a way that suggested he was considering physical violence.
I went to bed early. As a consequence, I rose with the dawn. I dressed plainly and left a message that the others should not wait for me. My anger was gone, replaced, as it often is, with a sort of guilt complicated by fear – fear that I would be humiliated again and fear that I had behaved badly with my friends and it couldn’t be fixed; a common fear for a young man, I think.
I had no experience of this particular world. I’d been a minor servant, and now, to all intents, I was a sort of ambassador. I didn’t know the rules, but I knew damned well that if I went back as the Order’s representative to King Peter, I would go alone, test the waters, and do my best to avoid public humiliation. And spare my friends. And, perhaps, apologise to them.
I was dirty, and I decided to wash. I managed to find a bathhouse. Like Bohemia and High Germany, the bathhouses of Poland are correctly notorious as dens of vice, staffed with scantily clad women whose single layer linen garments stick to their bodies in the steam in a most attractive manner.
Shall I go on? They really are splendid, and if priests don’t want men to fornicate, why did God make women so beautiful? Eh? Answer me that. By Saint George, I was in a much better mood when I emerged, clean in body if slightly soiled in soul. The woman who washed me – I can still see her, because she smiled all the time and nothing so becomes a woman as a smile – she was a good leman, luscious and lovesome and very tall. And very apt for the game.
Hmm. I digress too much. I think perhaps old men think too much of the pleasures of the body, eh? But by Saint Maurice, sirs, I had my sport, and discovered that she spoke some little Latin, and we amused each other thoroughly, chanting prayers back and forth in the steam.
‘You are a nun?’ I asked her, and she laughed.
‘Never in this life,’ she said. ‘And you are no priest.’