Count Bohemond Read online

  COUNT BOHEMOND

  ALFRED DUGGAN

  © Copyright, 1964, by Faber and Faber

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in New York by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Preface

  Alfred Duggan’s death on 4th April 1964 brought to an abrupt end a literary career of peculiar interest.

  The present, posthumous work is the last of a series of fifteen historical novels which began in 1950 with Knight with Armour. It was finished shortly before his death. Other projects were in his mind. He had planned, but not committed to writing a novel about Tancred in which the later stages of Count Bohemond would have been recounted. Besides these fictions he wrote three biographies, and seven historical studies for young readers, one of which, Growing up with the Norman Conquest, is due to appear in 1965. It is the opus of a full life-time accomplished in fourteen years, which has attracted the most dissimilar devotees and is likely to retain and multiply them.

  The author shunned personal advertisement and the public performances of the literary world, so that to most of his readers he was a somewhat remote figure. A biographical note may be helpful.

  Alfred’s life was the exact antithesis of the familiar contemporary failure who starts as writer, loses his powers in middle-age and falls into impotent debauchery.

  He was born in 1903. His father, who died when Alfred was a small boy, was a rich Argentine of Irish descent. His mother was the beautiful daughter of an American diplomatist. His mother brought him and his younger brother and sister to England for their education and in 1917 married Lord Curzon, then a member of the Inner War Cabinet and at the height of his powers. Alfred’s boyhood and youth were thus spent in the heart of the dominant English class in his step-father’s four great houses, with his own ample fortune to spend on pleasure and travel. Neither at Eton nor at Balliol did he show great application for work and he went down from Oxford prematurely. While there he kept a string of hunters for his use in winter and a night chauffeur to carry him to London night-clubs on summer evenings. None of his friends of forty years ago could have forecast the literary achievement of his later years. Lord Curzon was one of the very few who discerned his intellectual quality.

  At the age of twenty he professed Marxism and atheism but a few years later he returned to the Church of his childhood and remained a devout Conservative Catholic for the last thirty-five years of his life. His travels took him far but his main interest was the remains of the Crusader occupation of the Levant and of the Eastern Mediterranean. He visited and studied many castles which were then unknown except to a few adventurous experts. His first novel, and this, his last, deal with the Crusades, the period with which he was most familiar and sympathetic. As his fortune dwindled and finally disappeared he read more and more, exercising a remarkable memory for historical detail. He read without ambitions to professional scholarship for sheer zeal for the subject.

  He became a keen patriot and in 1939, though beyond the normal age of recruitment, not only enlisted as a private soldier but contrived to join a ‘free company’ (the forerunners of the Commandos), volunteers for hazardous service then being raised in a somewhat haphazard manner. In one of these bodies he was involved in the rear-guard of the retreat in Norway in conditions of great hardship which impaired his health and doubtless hastened his death. Invalided from the army he fulfilled his wish to serve his country by working for the rest of the war at the bench in an aeroplane factory.

  In 1953 he married and in 1956 settled at Ross-on-Wye, devoting himself assiduously to his newly found skill in writing. The complete happiness of his domestic life sustained him in his work and he seldom left home in his last years.

  This is all the biographical detail that the reader will need. Alfred’s writing is strictly impersonal and offers little scope for the critics who seek to relate the novelist’s invention to his personal experience. He spoke of his work with a modest detachment which concealed the dedication of an artist. When asked why he always concerned himself with obscure periods and places rather than with those more likely to excite popular curiosity, he would reply, with less than candour, that the scantiness of sources made research less laborious. In fact he was drawn to the dark ages by a real sense of kinship with them. Though in his working years entirely happy in his private life, he surveyed contemporary history with nothing but calm despair. He understood the Roman Empire and feudal Europe as he did not understand the world of the United Nations.

  His literary style remained constant. It is as crisp and clear in this posthumous novel as in his first. Most writers come to maturity after experiments they regret. There is no groping in Alfred’s work. At the age of forty-seven he published his first book. It was lucid and masterly, absolutely free of affectation or ostentation. He always in life, even in his years of dissipation, maintained a certain gravitas and formality. That is apparent in his prose but the severe good taste is lightened by dry humour, and a genial tolerance of the defects of human nature. His religious faith is latent in all he wrote. Never a propagandist or an apologist, he accepted the Church as the only proper milieu of man and man as being naturally prone to fall below Christian principle. Perhaps one of his finest passages is the ironical conclusion of Conscience of the King in which Cerdic, the remote ancestor of our royal house, reflects that he has survived the barbarian invaders, made his peace with them, defected from the Church, become a ruler among people of gross habits. He has seen a civilization dissolve but all is as well as could be hoped. And then the doubt: ‘Suppose all that nonsense’ (Christianity) ‘that my brother used to preach is really true after all?’

  Conscience of the King is my own favourite of Alfred’s books. It is to that I should direct an inquirer who wanted a quick look at the quintessential Duggan. But each has his own favourite. The reader is never tricked. The books, for those who love them, are habit forming. Count Bohemond will not disappoint. It is highly appropriate that this, his last work, should end with the triumph of Christian arms against the infidel.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Chapter I - The Name

  The ancient brick building still kept out the weather, though it had been scarred by fire. It was the only weathertight building in the valley. For this was the year 1058, twelve years after the sons of Tancred of Hauteville had come from Normandy on pilgrimage to St. Michael at Monte Gargano. They had stayed on to conquer Apulia. After twelve years of war and truce and treachery and war again they were still busy at their conquest.

  The long and spacious hall was roofed by three domes in line. That was why it still had a roof; there were no rafters to collapse when attackers set a torch to it. Once it had been the hunting lodge of a great Greek noble, in the good old days when all Italy south of Rome was the Theme of Langobardia, governed firmly from Constantinople. This evening torchlight streamed from its unbarred glassless windows, while a band of wandering foragers feasted in it.

  A few yards outside the main door rain hissed down on a trench still lined with glowing charcoal, where the cattle for the feast had been roasted. In the lee of a clump of trees horses and mules stood tethered under crude lean-tos woven from branches. Only a few grooms watched them. Most of the servants sheltered from the rain inside the hall, and the draggled women of the camp with them.

  Although it rained the evening was warm, and there was no fire within the hall. Most of the company squatted on the floor while they ate off their laps; but at the far end an inventive steward had dismembered a great plank door to make a proper trestle table. At this improvised high table the leaders of the band sat on decent heaps of turf or stone as though they were at home in a peaceful castle; there was even a long linen cloth to cover the rough pla
nking of the table.

  In the centre of the table, facing down the hall, sat the chief, Robert of Hauteville. But nowadays everyone called him Guiscard, the Weasel, even to his face; for his simple sense of humour delighted in nicknames. He was a big man, tall and broad, with a tangle of yellow hair falling to his shoulders and a silky golden beard fanned over his chest. With all that hair he looked older than he was, and his movements were ponderous; but his great frame was solid bone and muscle, not fat, and he held himself with dignified assurance.

  On his right sat his wife, the lady Alberada, a very young matron with the blue eyes, fair hair, and scarlet peeling complexion of a northerner who lives under the southern sun. Both were dressed in rough travelling tunics of grey wool, stained by mud and rain; though the lord wore a great gold chain round his neck and the lady several bracelets and rings; because in troublous times sensible people keep their jewellery handy. In a corner lay a heap of mail and cloaks, but the lord’s great sword was propped against his seat.

  Also at the high table were four captains of horse, two Norman and two Lombard. They were decent men, though not exactly gentry; they wore the greasy leather jerkins that went under their mail. Beside each sat his female companion, wife or concubine or casual whore. The lady Alberada took her company as she found it. At one end of the table, feeling rather out of place, was a blowsy Italian peasant-woman, trying to hold on her lap a vigorous and nearly naked four-year-old boy.

  Everybody in the hall had eaten as much as he or she could hold, and drunk all the wine that had been distributed. But it was too early for sleep, and at the high table the cups were still full; besides, the jongleur had not finished his performance.

  He was not a true jongleur, whatever the lord Robert might call him by courtesy. He was a tall skinny Italian peasant, dressed in ragged patchwork, and the song he squeaked in a jerky rhythm was in the local Apulian dialect of Romance. He knew none of the noble stories about Charlemagne and Roland, for normally he entertained his fellow-peasants at fairs and weddings. He had called in at this lighted building hoping to find a band of local brigands, and because his empty stomach could not bear to pass the wonderful smell of roasting meat. He had feared a whipping; for his simple bawdy anecdotes would not appeal to Norman warriors. But he knew by heart one genuinely funny mock-epic, and it had saved the situation.

  Now he had reached the climax, telling how this huge but slow-witted giant polished off his supper of a cow and a few sheep, with a netful of cabbage and some sacks of meal for garnish. After four barrels of wine he felt drowsy. Jack, who had been hiding in the brim of his hat, thought it safe to come out. Jack unfastened the giant’s shoulder-brooch and found he could just wield it, though it was as long as himself; he plunged it into the ear of giant Bohemond, and so slew him. Jack’s subsequent dealings with the forty-seven village maidens whom the giant had laid by as winter stores depended for their point more on gesture than on speech; but they amused the whole company and in particular the lord Robert, who liked his jokes simple. As the mountebank sat down there was a murmur of applause.

  “Jolly good, jolly good,” said the lord Robert with a chuckle. “Two silver pieces, even three, Alberada, don’t you think? See that he gets a hunk of cold beef and a small skin of wine to help him on his way tomorrow. That bit about the hard luck of maiden number forty-five was really very funny indeed, and I’ve had a good lesson in Italian at the same time. But Giant Bohemond’s dinner is the part I remember best.”

  There was a crash of earthenware from the end of the table, a roar of triumph and exclamations of dismay. Snatching at his sword the lord Robert looked up to meet the fierce gaze of his only son. The child had escaped from his nurse and climbed on the table, where he was now trying out his new teeth with concentrated energy on a cold and greasy rib of beef.

  “Mark, get down at once!” called the lady Alberada. “Drat the child. It’s not enough for him to tear out my inside when he’s born. Now he must make a disturbance the first time I am warm and comfortable after a week of riding in the rain. Maria, take him outside, spank him, and roll him up in his blankets.”

  “Let him be,” said Robert with another chuckle. “He’s enjoying himself like a true campaigner. You’re always nagging him about his birth, as though it were his fault that he was too big for you. I say he’s an example to us all; never grumbles at hardship and makes the best of times of plenty. God’s teeth, he looks just like the giant Bohemond at his dinner. That’s it, the giant Bohemond. Butler, another mug of wine all round, so that the company may drink to the health of the new Bohemond.”

  The huge boy, still chubby with babyhood, did indeed look like a young giant, his dimpled legs sticking out from his brief shirt and the bone gripped in his mouth. Robert Guiscard enjoyed giving nicknames.

  Everyone drank to the young giant Bohemond, and that started the party again. The wineskins went round until late in the evening. Young Mark-Bohemond knew he had done something clever, since all the common soldiers and their women were so pleased with him. But soon he fell asleep on his nurse’s lap. He woke up again as the table was taken down and the leaders of the band prepared for sleep at their end of the hall.

  By the time Maria had removed his single garment, doused his greasy face in cold water, and wrapped him in a thick blanket, he was wide awake and staring solemnly round him. He had a new name, which made this an evening to be specially remembered. But there was more to come, for instead of being carried off to sleep with Maria by the door he was dumped on the floor between the fur rugs which covered his parents at night.

  “You’re awake, Mark, aren’t you?” asked his mother, squatting on her rug barefoot but otherwise fully dressed, for she did not often take off her clothes on campaign. “That’s good. I can tell you the news tonight, and it won’t come as a surprise in the morning.”

  “He’s not Mark any more,” said his father, standing over him naked and hairy. “From now on he is Bohemond, and I shan’t call him anything else. But tell him the news by all means, so long as you tell it fairly.”

  “You and your nicknames,” mother muttered with a sigh. “Very well, Bohemond then. Of course I shall tell you fairly, because father and I have not quarrelled. It’s just that I am going away tomorrow morning, and from now on you won’t see much of me. But there’s no quarrel, remember.”

  She stared defiantly at her son, challenging him to believe what she said.

  “Of course there’s no quarrel,” father said quickly. “We are not parting because we don’t like being together, but because the Pope says we must. It seems we ought never to have got married in the first place. We are related in the something-or-other degree, which means that we are descended from the same ancestor if you go back far enough. So your mother must go away, and I must marry someone else. I suppose she also will marry someone else. Of course you stay with me, little Bohemond, since you are my only son and my heir. But you will see your mother from time to time, whenever she can manage to visit us.”

  “It’s the best way of parting,” his mother chimed in. “The marriage is dissolved because we can trace a relationship. Annulment for consanguinity, they call it. But while the marriage lasted it was genuine, even though now it’s over. I was a respectable wife, and your father was a respectable husband. You are legitimate, with no hint of bastardy. No slur on anyone’s character, and yet we are free to make a fresh start. In fact we must make a fresh start, we should be doing wrong if we stayed together. Annulment for consanguinity is a pillar of Christian matrimony. It ought to be used even more widely than it is. ”

  Little Bohemond withdrew his attention. Mother was using long words he could not understand, speaking past him to score off father. She did that quite often, whenever she was in a bad temper; because a four-year-old cannot be insulted by his own mother, and anyone who happens to overhear ought not to take offence. He could see that she was getting at father; though how he saw it he could not have explained.

  “Good night, mot
her dear,” he said with a winning smile. “See you some day. Good night, father dear. See you in the morning.”

  After that neat summing-up of the situation he smiled with even greater charm at both his parents, snuggled into his blanket, and rolled over.

  “Good night, little Mark.” “Good night, little Bohemond,” he heard them answer, with the hint of a sigh of dismay. It was comforting to know that he had scored off them both, though he was still not sure how he had done it.

  He was too excited to sleep. He lay still, thinking hard. He did not really mind parting from mother. She was never unkind but she had some grievance against him—something about his size, something he did not understand. He knew that by now he ought to have brothers and sisters, he could tell that by observation of the women who lived with the common soldiers. Apparently it was his fault, not his mother’s, that he was an only child. In some way he had injured her, not by his own wickedness but just by being himself. In her heart she would never forgive him.

  On the other hand mother might be more important than father, and he ought to have chosen her side. For of course he knew that they had quarrelled, and were parting because they did not want to go on living together. Most of the common soldiers came from Buonalbergo, and had served mother’s family before they took oath to father. But that meant only that there had been a time when Alberada of Buonalbergo had been grander than Robert of Hauteville, which was certainly true. For father used to boast that when he first arrived in Italy he was so poor he had to fight for wages, like any common trooper. But now father had become the famous Guiscard, able to hire as many soldiers as he needed; while mother was only the youthful aunt of the lord Drogo of Buonalbergo. In other words, mother’s greatness lay in the past, while father grew greater every day. A prudent child would stay with the mighty Guiscard.