Revenge of the Rose (14 page)

Konrad considered them a moment, then looked around the room for Boidon. “Boidon, send a hundred pounds of new coins to Willem at his inn first thing tomorrow.”

Everybody gaped at him.

“Sire?”
Marcus said in a shaky voice.

“I want to see what he does with it,” Konrad explained, looking straight at Jouglet, who suddenly had an itch in a most inconvenient place and had to turn away to scratch at it.

Marcus glanced quickly at Alphonse and then away again; Alphonse glanced quickly at Marcus and then away again. Hardly able to contain his abrupt anxiety, Marcus tried to return his attention to his evening sums. The count nodded a little to himself and finally continued up the stairway to his appointed room.

His work finished, Marcus threw on a sable-lined cloak and slipped downstairs and outside into the cool, moist evening air of the stone-courtyard, trying to stay calm. He sat on the lower steps of the broad staircase that led from Konrad’s suite straight down to the courtyard. He smiled wanly at a passing female form in the torchlight, but he was so distracted and disturbed he did not even register whether it was lady or servant. She wasn’t Imogen, so she didn’t interest him.

Marcus’s greatest strength as steward, as seneschal of Konrad’s itinerant court, was his ability to anticipate and therefore avert every conceivable thing that could go wrong. As with any extreme of mind, this trait was a danger as well as a strength: he was far too quick to see the worst calamity that might materialize from any situation. And Willem’s appearance, although an apparent delight to everybody else, reignited his one great, lurking fear.

He’s just a knight,
Marcus told himself.
He’s just some minor knight from nowhere. The count and Konrad will not even remember his appearance by next week. And the count himself just said today my wedding will be soon
. Already that chess game felt like it had happened weeks ago. He wondered what Jouglet was up to in championing the young Burgundian.

“Marcus?”

It was Konrad’s voice, above him. He rose quickly and turned to look up, bowing. “Sire!”

Konrad made a dismissive gesture and continued down the stairs, the night guard dutifully shadowing him. “She was lovely, that blonde, but she did not cure my insomnia.”

“My apologies, sire.”

Konrad sank onto the bottom steps and gestured Marcus to join him, then smiled conspiratorially, speaking too softly for the guard to hear. “It will be intriguing to learn the purpose of Jouglet’s game.”

“With the knight? I was musing on that this very moment, sire,” Marcus said.

“It is no doubt in my interest; his games always are. I’m curious to see how he tells Willem to spend the money, though. Speaking of curious— I’ve a passing query for you.”

There was no such thing as a passing query from His Majesty. “I’m entirely at your disposal, sire.”

“Your astonishingly idiotic adventure, bringing my little cousin to camp. Were you telling me the truth when you said you didn’t— “

“Absolutely,” Marcus said briskly, flushing. “I swear it. Both as your subject and as your oldest friend.”

“She is still a virgin?”

Oh, God,
Marcus thought, horrified.
He has to know if he can give her to someone else without a scandal.
“Of course she is, I would never dishonor her that way.”

“I’m not asking if
you’ve
dishonored her, I’m asking if she’s still a virgin,” Konrad said. “As I recall, you were the one concerned about protecting her maidenhead; she seemed blithely indifferent to it. I don’t trust women like that. Make sure she’s a virgin.”

“You’re taking her away from me, aren’t you?” Marcus said abruptly, in a choked voice.

The emperor frowned at him. “No,” he said with almost parental firmness, “but do not forget yourself, Marcus, it’s a political betrothal. It is only a perverse fluke that you’ve fallen for the girl, that is irrelevant and frankly rather tasteless of you. It was
extremely
impolitic of me to turn my back on what I saw at camp. I did so as your friend. But you must promise me, as a friend, that I, as your emperor, will not look a fool for pretending nothing happened. I will not suffer looking foolish at the hands of my own steward.”

“I promise,” Marcus said. “You don’t even need to ask. It’s her own honor I’m concerned with.”

“So my cousin is a virgin, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise.”

“She is a virgin who is betrothed and deeply in love with— “

“Oh, stop that!” Konrad said impatiently. “I didn’t say I was taking her away from you.”

“No, sire,” Marcus replied softly. “You did not
say
that.”

L
ater
that night, after making sure the sentries on duty were all sober, or at least awake, and claiming he had been called away to his ailing uncle’s bedside in Aachen, Marcus rode out— not to the north and Aachen, but south. He rode hard until morning, swapping out his horses at relay stations as he spent them, and after sleeping briefly he was up again, riding south some more along the raised trade roads of the Rhine valley. The roads were lined with shade trees to keep animals from dropping dead of sunstroke, but they offered no protection from the vicious mass of biting bugs that shattered the summer heat. That evening, as the sun was slanting sharply from the west, he followed it away from the river to a small grove of willows, elms, swamp oaks, and bush-roses around the ruins of a nunnery. Here there was a woods-woman, one who harvested medicinal herbs and berries. She lived in the ruins, and she was the great-aunt of one of Imogen’s handmaids.

And she was discreet. Over the past year he and Imogen had three times rendezvoused here, twice for a single overnight, once for several days together. The woods-woman fed them and made up a bed on the floor of the old chapel for them, asked nothing in return, and indifferently stored up the coins and jewels Marcus insisted on giving her. She had nothing to spend them on.

Imogen had arrived before him and now ran out of the oak-overrun cloister with her yellow tunic unbelted, smiling with anticipation. At the sight of that pale skin against that deep brown hair, his heart skipped and sank at once. “I’ve only been here a few moments!” she called to him in delight in her soft, murmuring voice. “Such perfect timing, all our while here can be together!” And grabbing his sleeve she pulled him toward the old chapel, laughing.

In the mottled shade of what had been a place of prayer, their hands were all over each other’s clothes and their lips all over each other’s faces. In an impressively short time they were lying facing each other, between layers of soft sheeting that Imogen had brought with her, on a bed of elm leaves and dried marsh grass. It was a bright sunny day, but inside here everything was warmly, lazily dappled. As always when they did this, Marcus was still in his drawers.

“I’ve missed you,” one of them said to the other, and they immediately forgot which of them had spoken. She rolled a little and tried to pull him on top of her, grinned as always to feel him grow hard against her.

“Now how shall we take care of that?” she purred, but her smile faded when she saw the expression on his face. “What’s wrong, love?”

He gave her a look that worried her, as if he would never see her again and wanted to memorize every fleck of color in her eyes. “We mustn’t,” he whispered, mostly to himself.

“Actually…,” she said, smiling up at him. “I had something very special planned for today.”

He sat up, looking tormented, almost frightened. “I shouldn’t have come, Imogen, I don’t have the strength right now to— “

“Good,” she said, placing one shushing finger over his lips. Her fingers smelled of apples. “Because I’m the queen of your heart and you must do my bidding.” Her voice, without her trying, was inherently seductive in its shy velvet softness. “My bidding is that you know me as a husband would.”

“Oh, no,” he groaned, pulling away from her. She sat up and climbed after him across the shaded sheets. “Imogen, you can’t keep doing this, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about consummation,” she said, innocently delighted with her own naughtiness. “And of course I don’t know what I’m talking about…yet.”

Every time they met it had become more frustrating for him to honor what seemed like a maddening technicality. Today there was both more and less reason than ever to respect it.

“We have other ways of pleasing each other, Imogen, please, you must save that for your wedding night.” And unable to stop himself he added, heavily, “What if your wedding night is not with me?”

Imogen understood him, and their situation, well enough to have anticipated this objection. “If it’s such a precious gift to give, I’d rather give it to my lover than to some stranger who happens to become my husband.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Marcus said. “It’ll hurt the first time, love, and then all you’ll have to show for it is pain that you associate with me, and a husband who will throw you out for harlotry.”

“You’re as bad as my father!” she suddenly snapped. “He locks me in, you lock me out! Don’t treat me like a child, Marcus!” She calmed herself, and the easy sweetness of her voice again softened him. “I doubt one woman in a thousand has the grace to feel for someone the way I do for you, and maybe one in ten thousand will have it reciprocated.
That
is the gift. We throw it back in God’s face not to act on it.”

Marcus was so startled by this reasoning he laughed. “I don’t think the church would much agree with that.”

“Scripture speaks only against coveting thy neighbor’s wife. I am not thy neighbor’s wife. And nowhere does it say the bride must be a virgin on her wedding night. Our Savior never said that. Our Savior didn’t care. One of his dearest followers was a woman but neither wife nor virgin.” She managed to smile at him, an incongruously coquettish look that always made him bend to her. “I’ll force myself on you,” she warned.

For an eternity of perhaps one heartbeat, Marcus stared at her, believing he would control himself. Then he pushed her down beneath him, his mouth pressed against hers almost violently. She reached for the forbidden drawstring of his linen drawers to untie it; he stared at her while she undressed him. He had seen, touched, tasted this pretty young body before but always with the knowledge that he had to hold himself in check. Without that knowledge it was even prettier.

It did hurt, a little; not as much as she had feared. Marcus was so overwhelmed by the moment that he sobbed into her hair, drowning her with kisses, stroking her face. “Oh, Imogen, you impossible beauty.” He kissed her once more, gently on the cheek, hoping desperately that he had not just ruined both their lives.

W
illem
awoke late, the morning after meeting Konrad, to find Jouglet’s angular face grinning into his, looking sleep deprived but no less jocund for it. The minstrel held a heavy leather bag that clinked promisingly with each movement. “Good morning! You’ve already slept through breakfast, but I made excuses for you to His Majesty. He sent me with this little gift for you.”

Willem yawned and sat up. He always slept well, but his dreams had betrayed how nervous he still was about making the right impression; Jouglet’s unexpected company was a reassuring way to start the morning.

The servant and pages were not in the room; Erec, already dressed, was slouched comfortably on the chest by the larger window quietly drilling himself on German grammar. The young man grinned as his nude cousin threw off the covers and reached for his bed-robe. “You will never believe what the emperor has sent you,” Erec announced.

Jouglet hefted the bag again. “Money!”

Willem blinked in confusion. “Why?”

“You don’t ask
why,
you ask
how much,
” Jouglet corrected him glibly, and lowered the bag, then began to untie the leather stays around it. “One hundred pounds. Each one with our dear emperor’s handsome profile upon it.”

Willem’s face registered astonishment, then relief. “Thank God, I can pay off my creditors,” he said. “I need to order lances and new shields from Montbéliard, and I already owe my supplier far too much. We had a harvest that went moldy last year— “

“You’re not paying off your debts
now,
” Jouglet said, as if this should have been obvious. “
Now,
you’re buying people gifts. You’re buying yourself better clothes. You’re making a huge donation to the brotherhood of St. Hippolyte. All the money will stay within the town walls so you can be seen using it, but
never
on
necessities.
”

Willem made a face and tied his robe closed. “That’s an absurd way to live. If this is what life is like at court, I am not sure I want to be a party to it.”

The minstrel sat beside Willem on the bed and with fatherly gravitas smiled at him. “Not in court, just in town. Families are so scattered here that pedigree means little, and townspeople by definition don’t live on great estates, so while you’re staying here, how much you spend is how much you’re worth. But it need be like this only until the tournament. I swear on your sister’s curving rump.”

“You’re not getting anywhere near that rump,” Erec scolded cheerfully.

Jouglet stayed focused on Willem. “I will write the man in Montbéliard in your name and convince him to send you what you need on credit.”

“If he’s as blindly trusting as I am, he’ll fall for it,” Willem said with a nervous laugh. He suddenly felt not reassured but overwhelmed by his friend’s omnipresence. He stood up to get away from Jouglet and turned to the open door, where a boy sat attendant. “Is there a scribe available to the inn?” Willem asked him. “Find him for me, lad.” He headed for a chest. “I need to write some letters of my own.”