"No," said the Duke. "I'll not go to Bordeaux tomorrow. Nor for a fortnight."
The captal put down his capon leg. "But my lord-"
"For two more weeks, Katrine and I shall be alone together. I'm going to take her to the Pyrenees."
"Pitie de Dieu! But you can't!" stammered the captal. "What would people say? And there's no time, the wedding arrangements - this is folly!"
John got up from the chair and lifted his eyebrows. "You forget, de Grailly, whom you are addressing!"
The captal flushed and murmured apology while he thought, These English - they are mad. Sentimental, stiff-necked fools, God pity them. He cannot go running around the country with his harlot just now, it's imbecile. Fraught with clanger too, political and personal.
But the captal found there was no help for it. The Duke gave him minute instructions and ended the interview by calling "Katrine" in a voice of intense longing.
The lovers left Chateau la Teste the next noon, headed for the south, and dressed as a nondescript couple of pilgrims, John in the brown sackcloth he had used earlier when he found Katherine at the cathedral, and she in a short green kirtle and cape which had come from a chest in the keep. Green was the colour of true love and they were delighted with the find. With them on the journey went two of the captal's men, a shepherd and a blacksmith, both sturdy fellows well acquainted with the nearly trackless wastelands they must traverse, but of wits too dull to question this expedition or the couple they escorted.
Nirac did not accompany his master, as he had expected to do when he heard of the plan. Even had Katherine's lightest request not been law to John at that time, he himself felt less affection for Nirac than he used to. The little Gascon had lost his charm and impudent smile, he had received the Duke's orders to return to Bordeaux in heavy silence. His eyes were bloodshot, his sallow skin had a grey tinge, so that John had said kindly, "Have you a fever, Nirac? You don't look well. You must rest till I return. Here," and he gave him a gold noble, "a little reward for your many services."
"For my services, mon duc" Nirac repeated in a peculiar tone. The Duke glanced at him, but though he heard something like "You know not what service I've rendered you," he dismissed it as a vagary.
When they left the courtyard of La Teste, Katherine rode pillion behind John on Palamon. As she glanced back in farewell towards the round tower where she had known rapture, she saw Nirac standing against the wall apart from the stable-boys who had gathered in the court.
Nirac's little monkey face was twisted as though he were crying. It was turned up towards the oblivious Duke, but when the Gascon felt Katherine's gaze, his glance shifted to her and she waved to him in sympathy, feeling something of Nirac's miserable jealousy. He did not wave back and at that distance she could not be sure, but it seemed as though his eyes glinted at her with sudden bleak hatred.
This distressed her for only a second, then she forgot him. Her arms tightened around John's waist and she leaned her cheek on his shoulder. Beneath the musty harsh sackcloth she sensed the warmth of his skin and its cleanly male tang of bergamot.
He raised one of her hands from his girdle and kissed the palm, then turned and smiled at her. "You are happy, sweet heart?"
"Happy, my dearest lord."
"Nay, Katrine, for these-" He could not bear to put a term to the time they would be like this together, nor had she asked. They spoke of nothing but each other and their love. "For this journey I am not your 'Lord,' we are but John and Katherine, a respectable couple bound like many another on pilgrimage to Compostela. We are nothing else."
He did not know himself why he yearned to take her to the wildness and grandeur of the Pyrenees. Perhaps it was that he wished to be alone with her in lands which did not owe him suzerainty and where no one could know him. Perhaps it was the more primitive instinct of seeking the most beautiful of natural frames for their love.
And on the second day as they crossed Les Landes, when they saw the Pyrenees, ragged crests of purple shadows tinged with silver, sharp-etched against the southern sky, Katherine caught her breath. Tears came to her eyes. She shared at once with him the mystic exaltation that called out to them like a great chord of music from these mountains, and as they penetrated through the strange Basque lands into Navarre, climbing ever upward amongst rushing streams, rock cliffs and the darkness of pines, their love deepened. No longer frenzied in its physical hunger but sustained and quietened by a spirit higher than themselves.
One day they reached Roncevalles at the top of the pass near the Pas de Roland where Charlemagne's great paladin had been killed six hundred years before. Here there was a large abbey built for the accommodation of travellers and pilgrims between Spain and France. But they avoided the abbey with its curious priests and summer load of wayfarers and pushed on some miles to a tiny mountain inn.
This inn was a rendezvous for smugglers and accustomed to receiving all manner of guests. The black-eyed landlady asked no questions, responded with a shrug to John's halting Basque, bit the silver coin he gave her, and allotted them a small clean chamber over the storage room, while the captal's two servitors were quartered in one of the many caves hollowed out of the cliff.
The days that John and Katherine spent at the inn were a timeless enchantment. They slept on a pile of sweet-smelling hay. They drank the strong heady wine that was poured from goatskins, and ate trout and ecrevisses and hot tasty dishes brewed with the red peppers that dangled like strings of great rubies along the creamy inn walls. They wandered off amongst the mountains and found a small pastured valley by a waterfall where-Katherine picked wild flowers: the tiny lemon-coloured saxifrages, violet ramondia, white spiky asphodel, and alpen-rose. She wove them into garlands while John lay on the velvet greensward beside her, pelting her lazily with the flowers, or content to watch her. Sometimes they sang together, and he often recited to her poems and ballads he had learned in his youth.
In this bright secret valley which they had made their own, there was a ruined chapel, abandoned long ago by the mountaineers, who thought it haunted by the wild mountain spirits. Two of the chapel walls had fallen into rubble, but against a portion of the east wall the rough square altar still stood. It was carved with odd runic scrolls and supported a stone crucifix.
When nearly a week had passed there came a night that Katherine felt a change. New dark urgency and restlessness were on her lover, he embraced her with more violent, even brutal, passion. Several times he started to speak to her but checked himself, and she was afraid.
She fell at last into heavy, miserable sleep. When she awoke the first rays of the sun came through the window. She started up with a cry, for he was not beside her. She waited and called, but there was no answer. She dressed with clumsy shaking fingers, ran down through the deserted inn and outside into the cool sunrise.
Palamon was in the stable. He whickered gently as she spoke to him, so she guessed where John had gone, and ran up the stony hills and through the beech and pine copses until she reached their valley. At first she could not find him,, then she looked upward and saw a tall solitary figure standing on top of a little peak that guarded the valley to the south.
She slowed her pace and climbed up to him silently. He did not move as she joined him on the summit; she thought he had not heard her. His head was lifted, his tawny hair stirred in the wind, while he gazed with fixed sombre intensity over distant plains that lay spread out far below them to the dim horizon.
Her heart beat hard and painfully, seeing that he had indeed gone from her, and there was no welcome.