The Lute Player by Norah Lofts

or station, is ineligible for loving. I will guarantee that if five men, living together as we five women did, had had introduced into their company a young female who, though pretty and of engaging manners, was entirely ineligible, they would yet remain conscious of her sex. They would not immediately try to turn her into a male. Catherine, Pila and Maria did try, from the first, to emasculate Blondel.
    ‘Dear boy, these silks are tangled; sort them for me.’
    ‘Blondel, tell me, which girdle is better with this gown, the rose or the yellow?’
    And worse things, worse. They talked before him of things they would never have dreamed of mentioning before a man or before any boy who was to become a man, not merely of shifts and body linen, of bowels loose or bound, but of the punctually recurrent headaches, the pains under the girdle, the ankles that swelled with the regularity of the moon’s changes. Nothing was hidden.
    I was sickened; shamed for myself and for them. My body was crooked and unfitted for love but my mind and my feelings were, I had discovered, those of an ordinary woman. I could look on this boy and feel not only love but fierce desire; and often I did so look, when I was safe from observation, and gave my imagination rein and thought how it would be if I were straight and comely and he my lover. Into such a dream would break some woman’s voice, smearing, denying, reducing; making what to me was a man as sexless as Blanco, the eunuch.
    In such moments of torment I wished that he would leave. Take his lute and go out into the world and find some girl who would regard him as I did and discover his manhood. But the desire to escape seemed to have died in him and I could never bring myself to say the resurrecting word. On the other hand, he did not succumb easily to his enchantment. He would often absent himself—giving the bear as an excuse—and go off to the stables and come back smelling of horses, leather, oil and liniment. The ladies would then wrinkle their noses and complain. And I would lean as near as I could on some pretext or other, savouring the male, outdoor scent which fitted in with the vision I cherished of another Blondel and another Anna.
    I knew quite well, of course, why he remained with us almost against his will. He was in love with Berengaria in much the same dumb, hopeless fashion in which I was in love with him and in which she was in love with Richard Plantagenet. Sometimes I thought it was a little comic that there should be three of us under the same roof, all suffering from the same ailment and all keeping our secrets so well. And sometimes I thought, All this wasted love, all this yearning towards someone who is yearning for someone else, like those figures perpetually pursuing one another around the Greek vase which Grandfather brought home from the East. All that was lacking to make the circle complete was that the Duke of Aquitaine should lose his eyesight and his senses and fall in love with me!
    I had to make what mental sport I could out of the situation because I dared not be sorry for myself. For Berengaria, as the year moved on and no news came from England, I did feel sorry and for Blondel I did suffer vicarious agonies.
    Whatever could be done for Berengaria had been done or was being done. For me nothing short of rebirth could do anything. But as the year moved downhill into autumn and my love-sharpened eyes saw new lines carved into the boy’s face and I daily witnessed the deadly soft encroachments of the bower, it did occur to me that something might be done to save him. He was young, his attachment to Berengaria was completely fantastical; if he could be got away, restored to a normal manner of life, he would be saved. He’d fall in love, I thought, with the first pink-cheeked, round-bosomed girl who looked at him kindly.
    I realise now that I was guilty of supreme egotism, attributing to myself and to myself alone devotion and deathless fidelity and