company will have to do,” he declared, persisting until they grudgingly yielded.
Master Ralph Besace, Richard’s chief physician, had been holding his wrist during the bloodletting, and he signaled now for it to cease, saying the king’s pulse was dropping too fast. Henri took advantage of the moment to usher the women away and out into the cooling night air. He knew they’d moved into the pavilion, setting up trundle beds behind a screen and taking turns sitting with Richard, but he doubted that either of them had slept more than a few hours in days. He chided them gently as they headed for his tent, pointing out that it would do Richard no good if they fell ill, too. But he did not expect them to heed him, nor did they.
Henri set a better table than most of his fellow crusaders, thanks to his friend Balian, who’d provided him with a cook familiar with Saracen cuisine and spices. Joanna and Berengaria were served a lamb dish called sikbāj, roasted scallops, and stuffed dates, but they merely picked at their food, quizzing Henri, instead, about his own experience with Arnaldia. To bring down his fever, Richard had been given ficaria and basil in wine, and when that did not help, the doctors had tried galingale and then black hellebore. Did Henri remember his treatment?
Searching his memory, he recalled taking columbine, pounded and then strained into juice through a thin cloth, and myrrh drunk in warm wine; the women made mental notes to mention this to Richard’s doctors. Richard was being given sponge baths with cool water, they related, and bled, of course, although one of the doctors insisted it was dangerous to bleed a man after the twenty-fifth of the month. How, they asked in despair, were they to know which advice to follow?
Henri did his best to console them, talking of the many men, like himself, who’d made a full recovery from Arnaldia, and suggesting prayers to Blasius, the patron saint for diseases of the throat and lungs, as Richard’s throat was very sore and he was troubled by painful sores in his mouth. When they were ready to depart, he rummaged around in his coffers until he found a favorite amber ring, for it was said to ward off fevers, and then walked them back to the royal pavilion.
Upon their return, they were initially alarmed to be told the Bishop of Salisbury had shriven Richard of his sins, but André was able to reassure them that this was merely a sensible precaution, not a sign that Richard had taken a turn for the worse. After all, he pointed out, men always confessed their sins ere going into battle. Once Joanna retired behind the women’s screen to get a few hours sleep, Berengaria pulled a chair up to the bed. The nights since Richard was stricken had been unusually quiet. She could still hear the thudding of stones as they crashed into the city walls, but otherwise a pall seemed to have settled over the camp. Richard showed no curiosity when she slipped Henri’s amber ring onto his finger, and when she brought him a hot beverage brewed from sage leaves, telling him it was said to heal mouth ulcers, he sipped obediently as she held the cup to his blistered lips.
It frightened her that he was suddenly so passive; she much preferred his earlier bad-tempered outbursts, even when they’d been directed at her. As the hours passed, she replaced the wet compresses upon his forehead, gave him wine mixed with the doctors’ latest concoction, smoothed ointment upon his blisters, and blinked back tears after he acknowledged her ministrations with the flicker of a smile. She was so exhausted that when Joanna appeared to relieve her vigil, she fell onto her bed fully dressed and was asleep almost at once.
Her transition from uneasy dreams to wretched reality was so abrupt that she awoke with a start, momentarily confused to find Joanna bending over her. “Is it my turn?” she asked, stifling a yawn. But then she saw the tears welling in the other woman’s eyes.
FROM THE CHRONICLE of Bahā’ al-Dīn Ibn Shaddād, a trusted adviser of Salah al-Dīn and an eyewitness to the events at the siege of Acre: “The Franks were at this time so much concerned at the increasing gravity of the King of England’s illness that they even discontinued for a while their attack on the city.”
RICHARD WAS VERY ILL. But he was aware only of intolerable,