Mildly Mock-Archaic

MEN LIKE SHADOWS (343 pp.)--Dorothy Charques -- Coward-McCann ($3.75).

The boar, an old one and cunning, broke cover near the chalk pit and charged straight for the line of trees that hid its edge. After him clattered the whole hunt--King Richard the Lion Heart in the lead. At the rim of the chalk pit the boar pivoted and scuttled off to safety, while the beguiled lead hounds fell yelping into space.

"Christ, oh Christ . . . the King's horse!" cried a looker-on. "No one can check him!" At that instant John of Oversley, a young English squire, shouted to his friend Robert of Kinwarton: "Shoot, Robert . . . shoot to turn the King's horse!" Robert shot. The arrow sang before the startled eyes of the charger and he reared back. And so, as Author Dorothy Charques tells it, King Richard was preserved to go on the Third Crusade, and squires John and Robert, as their reward, got a chance to go along in his personal entourage. Men Like Shadows is Squire John's story of their adventures.

Author Charques' novel is not quite a match for two splendid masterpieces of historical fiction recently produced by other Englishwomen: The Golden Hand, by Edith Simon, and The Man On A Donkey, by H. F. M. Prescott. Yet it has the charm of a hearty good story, and if the style is mildly mock-archaic, it is pretty good in its pretense.

Fever Dew In Sicily. King Richard gathers his host at Vezelay in France, and there the two squires meet a brilliant young Frenchman, Guy de Passy. John is puzzled by the fellow, Robert not. "It is this manner of the great world about him that astonishes and charms you," he says to John. "I think he rates us lowly . . . myself discontented and half a monk; you a staunch simpleton . . . I would say he is one of those people who may perish of their own cleverness."

The three meet agan in Sicily, where King Richard pauses for a while; and Robert, John and Guy pass a languishing time in the bower of the Lady Melisande des Preaux, of Richard's court: "We trod on velvet there, on turf that some miracle of watering had kept soft and green as a nunnery lawn, past tall late lillies and dark cypress trees, down tiled paths between beds of yellow and red roses, at last to a colonnade of white fluted columns, the earth between set thick with violet leaves."

Robert's brow is the first to take a fever dew for this belle dame sans merci, and soon the two are sighing full sore. John begins to thirst after the lady, too, but being a practical fellow, quenches himself at her serving maid. Guy comes along a little later and makes such a pretty leg that the fickle fair forgets all about Robert, who takes, in his turn, to the consolations of religion. Soon, though, it's dash away all to the Holy Land, and the drums of war drown out the viole d'amour.

Daffodils in England. At the siege of Acre, John surprises Guy in the act of loosing a carrier pigeon, and realizes that all the Frenchman's cynicism was not just words: the rascal is dealing with the enemy. Guy takes flight, and the Lady Melisande, alas, goes after him. Robert and John and King Richard all have plenty of troubles after that; Robert never does live to return home.

Guy has a rather steep comedown--in the end he jumps off a cliff. John, a much wiser young squire, gets home to England, where all ends with a nice, bucolic chirrup: "The kingcups and the wild daffodils were out in the water meadows; from the dovecot came the sudden passion and stir of wings." And Elfrida, the girl John left behind him, "had grown tall; under the sun she showed satin-fair."

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