Read Online The Passionate Brood by Margaret Campbell Barnes - Free Book Online Page A

gossip and, while lending half an ear to their husbands’ everlasting sports talk, they could note what kind of wimples were being worn in Paris or Milan.
    Probably the only woman who was bored was Berengaria. She was tired of being Queen of Beauty and having to crown the victors. Of course, she had only to look in the metal of her mirror to know that she was beautiful; but then, being Sancho’s only daughter, she supposed that she would have been chosen had she been as ugly as a witch. Her flower-decked pavilion always looked down upon the same scene. The tiltyard thronged with people. The townsfolk crowded round the barriers of the oblong lists, leaving a gap at either end for the competitors, whose tents stretched like a field of gaily striped mushrooms to the castle walls. The groups of men-at-arms looking down from the battlements.
    The guests were much the same this year as last. The same banners floated from the King’s stand, the same kind of rose garlands decorated her own. Her ladies had been making them for days, and she was weary of the sight of them. Berengaria loved roses best in a garden, and hated the way Isabella and Henrietta crushed them with eager elbows as they leaned over the balcony, showing off their bright new gowns.
    All the forenoon she had sat opposite to her parents, smiling at the victors and saying the right thing to important guests as they strolled past between bouts. And now the heat and clamour had given her a headache. The herald’s shrill trumpeting had become an agony. She still listened politely each time the Marshal called the names of fresh combatants, but once all eyes were upon them in the lists she took the opportunity of moving farther into the shadow of the awning and surreptitiously reading an illuminated book of poems.
    “Why don’t you watch, Madam?” asked her youngest lady, to whom it was like all the minstrels’ tales come true.
    “Because I hate the sight of blood, Yvette,” confided Berengaria. Not for worlds would she have had Isabella and Henrietta overhear confession of such weakness. From the front of the pavilion scraps of their conversation drifted back like a thin dissonance through the deep harmony of the words she was reading.
    “That scarred knight with the black plume fought all through the last Crusade. I asked him if the Saracen girls were really so beautiful—”
    “Look, Henrietta, there goes my handsome Sicilian! How he kissed me last night!”
    Their voices were drowned by a fresh fanfare. This time even the booming voice of the Marshal was inaudible through the cheering of the crowd. A knight spurred across the lists, making sparks fly as he pulled his charger to its haunches before the King. Without looking up, Berengaria knew it must be William de Barre, back from the Holy Land. De Barre, making a spectacular entrance. How she loathed the man! A proud, hard-bitten champion, who went from one tournament to another winning all the prizes.
    “What do you suppose he does with them all?” Yvette was asking.
    “Distributes them among his women!” Isabella told her succinctly.
    At least, thought Berengaria, there is one prize he will never win. Although of bastard blood, he had had the temerity to ask for her in marriage, and it said much for her father’s tolerance that he was still invited to compete. She wished that Raymond of Toulouse or someone could unhorse him. “How uninterestingly alike they all look in their armour!” she yawned. “This is the last bout before dinner, isn’t it, Henrietta?”
    “Yes, Madam. And if Sir William de Barre wins he will meet Count Raymond tomorrow in the final bout.”
    “Of course he will win,” said Berengaria. “There is never anything new in these tournaments.”
    “There is a new foreign knight, Madam,” reported Isabella, over her shoulder.
    “He’s riding in now. On such a sorry charger!” laughed Henrietta.
    Yvette turned eagerly to look. “He is so tall!”
    “And awkward,”