Excerpts: Volume I
<excerpt from Volume I>
Morning opened with a sky of infinite bright blue above a world encased in ice. The road, swept clean by the night’s wind, was like a band of polished silver. Trees glinted in the sunlight: their branches, sheathed in crystal, scattered rainbows from each prismed twig. The stubble in the fields was white as winter fur.
The encampment of Londoners, a long dark smudge on the white landscape, swarmed like a hive. The sleepless cooks and players made their last preparations. Scents of wood-smoke and of dainty dishes wafted in the icy air. Seamstresses sewed last-minute repairs. Guildsmen unpacked and counted silver serving vessels while apprentices tied swags of evergreens to litters that would bear the feast.
Simon was everywhere, like a general seeing to the readiness of his troops before battle. He checked the cook sheds, the teams of bearers and the pageant wagons’ readiness. As he went his rounds, suddenly the noisy clatter of the camp was broken by the blaring of brass horns.
Above the curve where the road crested a distant hill, bright pennants were fluttering.
The cooks began to ladle their hot victuals into silver chargers. Players hurried to their places on the pageant wagons. Saint Laurence climbed upon his grill of painted flames. Saint Lucy, in a flutter of nerves, searched her pockets for her eyeballs. Saint Sebastian adjusted the arrows piercing his breast. Saint George’s dragon was stoked until its three nodding heads belched flames as well as smoke. And Hellsmouth roared with flames so hot the miserable parishioners who played the Damned could shed their cloaks and stand in their thin under-shifts. Theirs was a pageant usually performed in summertime.
The Royal Progress came on with banners of red, blue, yellow, white and black with splashing fringe of gold. Heralds and flag bearers in the red and gold livery of Plantagenet blew horns, beat drums and held aloft a forest of flags that snapped in the brisk wind. The lords of England followed in fur cloaks and pheasant-feathered hats, their horses caparisoned in satins with heraldic embroideries and fringes to their hocks.
The Londoners swarmed toward the parade. Jugglers tossed fruit to the riders and danced over ropes of sausages. Guild masters, in their finest fur-lined robes and jewels, bore holly-swagged litters heavy with silver vessels heaped with rich, rare foods: pimpernel and lark pastries, sugared flawns, black puddings, squabs in wine, pies filled with salmon and with luce, and boars bursting with plums and apricots.
Cherub-faced apprentices served as cupbearers with brimming beakers of hippocras and mead. The Master of the Vintners hurried with a litter of cups and ewers from the guild’s “Fountain of Cana,” where the wine had frozen in arches and cascades like the buttresses and pinnacles of a fanciful cathedral made of crimson ice.
At the side of the road the pageant wagons displayed their saints. The child Saint Philomel climbed to the top of a living pyramid of angel acrobats costumed in white robes and goose-feather wings. Saint Michael, in gold armor, brandished a silver sword and held aloft a torpid snake. Saint Margaret, her face blackened and bloody, her skirts painted with flames, stood in a huge cauldron, her shivering arms uplifted joyously. Saint Lucy thrust out her hands, each holding an eye. Saint Magnus knelt before a sturdy, leather-aproned butcher who hacked at the saint’s neck with a gigantic wooden axe. Saint George, in silver helm and suit of mail, battled his fire-spewing dragon as its flames melted the frozen earth to mud beneath his feet.
Children of Saint George’s parish, dressed as monster pups, darted through the march to offer chalices of soringue of eels to King Henry, for eels were known to be his favorite dish.
Among the marchers, after the heralds, the flag bearers and lords, came curtained, horse-borne palanquins with swaying golden tassels. Ladies peeped from the curtains to take the dainty foods offered by the masters of the guilds. Whenever a lady could be glimpsed, cries rose from the onlookers, “Is that she?” The Londoners vied to catch the first sight of their queen-to-be, the beauty who had won King Henry’s heart.
The royal bailiffs, dressed in scarlet livery with golden lions en passant guardant, came next.
And then there was no question: King Henry and Eleanor of Provence rode side by side. In furs and cloth-of-gold, the King of England sat upon a splendid chestnut destrier manteled in broad stripes of red and gold. His bride, in cloth-of-silver lined with ermine as white as the fields, rode beside him on a milk-white palfrey draped in midnight blue.
Eleanor held her head high, already a queen. She was sixteen, and everyone agreed her beauty beggared Hurle’s description. She had the luminous petal-pink complexion of her mother, Beatrice of Savoy. Her eyes were large and lustrous blue. Her forehead, like a fawn’s, was wide and round. She wore no veil; her hair, a treasure of bright golden curls, fell freely upon the shoulders of her cloak. But more than Nature’s gifts, a studied grace flowed in her every gesture. She was sensuous. In the arts of desire the lady was well schooled. She filled to the full the ideal of a people whose doctrine of love the Church declared perverse, lubricious and heretical. Henry was dazzled, madly in love.
Simon, with his sheaf of lists and maps of the festival grounds, found himself at the roadside as the royal couple passed. The bride, laughing at a jest of Henry’s, turned aside an instant. Her glance met Simon’s narrowed gaze. Then she moved on.
Simon looked after her. He could not draw his gaze away, though soon he could see no more than a glint of golden hair beyond the intervening riders.
“My lord,” deMesnil, at Simon’s elbow, tried to draw his master’s attention. “She is a rare beauty,” he nodded solemnly. “I pray she’ll prove a proper queen.”
Simon said nothing. He had no words for the sudden emptiness he felt, the sensation that his heart had gone where his eyes could not, and left a gaping vacancy in his breast. He coughed, and realized he hadn’t been breathing. Pulling his gaze to deMesnil was like turning away from sunlight to resume a life in dismal shade.
Seeing his master’s expression, deMesnil looked away, down at his feet, stymied with embarrassment.
