Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [359]
The knight of Avonsford and his wife had been in love for twenty years. Of their three children, two had died in infancy, one of them a girl; Rose wished she had been able to give her husband more. “I should like a daughter. She would be like you,” he had often told her, and she had loved him for this simple compliment. But one child had survived, Thomas, and he was their greatest joy.
Indeed this was the problem. Like many Englishmen of his class, Godefroi had sent his son to receive part of his education at the castle of anotner lord. The boy was fifteen now, a page; in due course he would become a squire and then, perhaps a knight. To teach him his knightly duties and the manners of a gentleman, Gilbert had chosen his own brother-in-law, Ranulf de Whiteheath – a sensible choice, not only because he was the boy’s uncle, but also because the Whiteheath establishment was considerably larger and more splendid than Avonsford. He had even heard that Ranulf used silver forks – a most unusual sophistication when most men even of his class were content with knives alone.
“You’ll see how things should be done,” he told Thomas; “and one day at Avonsford, if we find you a rich wife, you’ll be able to live as a noble really should.”
With this new threat of the plague, though, he was not sure what to do. Should he summon the boy home, or leave him at Whiteheath? He hated not to have Thomas at his side at such a time, but which was the safer place?
This was the difficult question he and Rose debated during their meal.
It was the normal custom at Avonsford for a musician to play while the lord of the manor supped, and then for the vicar of the little church, who in the absence of any other priest acted as a private chaplain to Godefroi as well, to read to the lord afterwards. Today however, Gilbert had dispensed with the musician, a peasant from the village who played the bagpipes atrociously.
At the end of the meal, they were still uncertain what to do. Perhaps, after all, this plague the merchant spoke of would not come.
It was now that Godefroi saw the priest enter and, not wishing to disappoint him, nodded curtly for him to begin. Perhaps his recital would help him to decide.
He was a balding young man in his twenties with gap teeth and a high-pitched voice; but he read clearly. Now he stood respectfully before the table and pulling out a little book that Godefroi had lent him announced:
“The tale of Sir Orfeo.”
There was no poem that Gilbert loved more than this popular ballad. In this recent courtly version, the legendary Orpheus had become an Arthurian Knight, Dame Euridice his lady, and the underworld to which he journeyed to find her had become the faery kingdom. It would have pleased Godefroi to know that, several feet under the ground of the manor house there lay a broken Roman mosaic celebrating its hero; but he would scarcely have recognised the Romano-British Orpheus depicted there.
It was a haunting tale.
Orfeo was a king
In England, a high lording.
Orfeo most of anything
Loved the delight of harping.
As he recited the gentle cadences of the bitter-sweet poem, the vicar’s high voice became almost tuneful; and Gilbert, who knew it so well, nodded encouragement from time to time.
It was the sense of sorrow in the early lines that moved the knight, as the poem told how Euridice sleeps with her ladies under an orchard tree and awakens half mad after a dream in which the faery king has told her that he will steal her away the very next day.