Revenge of the Rose (15 page)

“You’d best do it quickly or we’ll be late for dinner as well as breakfast,” Jouglet said.

“We?” Willem echoed, a little more sharply than needed. “You’re free to go to court whenever you care to. You are not bound to me as if you were my hound.”

There was a brief silence as Willem busied himself retrieving his discolored blue riding tunic from a chest.

“You should have taken Konrad’s offer of a woman, milord, you need relief from all your tension,” Jouglet scolded softly from the bed. “I am not the hound,
you
are— and a pup yet, hardly ready to perform well without your trainer. Your trainer whom you must not bite or you will be abandoned on the side of the road like an ill-tempered little mutt.”

“I apologize,” said Willem gruffly, shaking out the riding tunic. He tossed it down and grimaced at it. “I need to dress well for dinner, don’t I?” he said wearily. “
Usable
clothing has little worth at castle tables ever, I imagine.”

“Showing up in riding gear might make a good impression, actually,” Jouglet suggested. “The earnest knight preparing for the tourney, all of that. The ladies will like it. Were you taken with any of them last night?”

Willem, honest to a fault, admitted that no, he had not been.

When the scribe arrived, leather box of parchment under his arm, Willem sat him by the larger window and dictated as he dressed. He wrote first to Renard, the knight who had his former helmet, telling him about the tournament and encouraging him to summon the knights of Burgundy to come and ride with him.

“If you can gather enough of them,” Erec hummed to Willem, “you might lead a whole battalion.”

“I think he’ll be doing that anyhow,” Jouglet said with satisfaction, still seated on the bed and picking loose threads from the coverlet. “And they’ll all be the emperor’s own men, I wager.”

Willem huffed a little as he laced his boots. “Jouglet, now you are out of your element. If Konrad raised me above his own retinue, one of them would probably kill me in my sleep. Second letter,” he said briskly, straightening and turning back to the scribe. This one was to his mother and sister, telling them also of the upcoming tournament, and with mild exaggeration describing what a magnificent character the emperor had. Then, with some understatement, he described how he’d been received at court.

“Add this,” Jouglet instructed the scribe. “Jouglet says Willem is not giving himself enough credit, but that is customary, isn’t it?”

“Don’t write that,” Willem told the scribe. He was getting irked, although he did not know why, by Jouglet’s relentless championing. “Just sign it, with great regard, your loving son and brother, Willem.” He pulled on his second glove. “Erec, call for the horses.”

Erec departed at once with the scribe, and Willem turned to the only other person left in the room, still casually lolling on the bed. “Jouglet, it will take a while to saddle up, perhaps you should walk yourself to the castle so we do not make you late. Thank you greatly for bringing me the king’s gift.” He added with unusual archness, “I imagine I’m expected to buy something for you with it as well?”

“No you are not,” the minstrel retorted with cool, contained annoyance, and sat up sharply. “In fact, look what I have brought you, sweetheart.” Jouglet went to the leather fiddle case lying by the door, pulled out from under it the two appropriated tunics from the night before, and tossed them with force onto a chest. “I was bringing these back to you. I only took them to make a show of them to Konrad. I am not trying to profit by you, Willem.”

Willem reddened. “I apologize,” he said, not meeting Jouglet’s eyes. Then, meeting Jouglet’s eyes after all: “I would like to know what you
are
doing. I feel beholden to you— and I know I am, but I’d rest more comfortable understanding
why.
”

“Beholden?” Jouglet echoed. “Last night it was grateful, and now—
beholden
?” The hazel eyes appraised Willem, hurt. “You insult me, Willem. You insult the very idea of friendship.”

“Stop being such a woman,” Willem said defensively.

Jouglet’s face flashed with indignation. “And now I’m a
woman
? Calling me
eunuch
back in Dole was not enough of an insult? What must I do to prove myself, molest your sister?” And with a snicker, unable to resist it: “More than I have already, I mean?”

Willem laughed irritably. “I’m sorry I said ‘beholden,’ does that help? I’m grateful, I’m very grateful.” A pause. “But I would still prefer you walk to the castle.” Another pause. “It will be good to see you there, in company.”

Jouglet shrugged dismissively, grabbed the fiddle case, and left the room without bowing or glancing back.

The minstrel never showed up for dinner at the castle.

This made facing dinner at the castle terrifying for Willem, and he was reminded ruefully how much he had depended on Jouglet’s silent presence to ballast him the night before. The absence was unremarkable to all but Willem; young Jouglet, he learned, was known for disappearing for days or even weeks, returning with secretive smiles and other symptoms of having spent far too much time carousing— but also laden with useful gossip for Konrad’s private hearing.

Dinner was served in the hall, kept cool and comfortable by buffeting mountain gusts even under a relentless midday sun. It was a substantial meal with less hubbub than the supper feast, the highlight being a stew of salmon transported live to the castle from the North Sea in great barrels of ocean water. Alphonse, Count of Burgundy, was absent, as was Marcus, and this time Willem did not protest sitting beside the king. Cardinal Paul sat to Konrad’s left again, his morbid fascination with Willem’s presence as unfathomable and unnerving as it had been the night before.

Over the course of the dinner— during which he drank more than usual, in a bootless effort to relax— Willem and his monarch made unexpected and singular impressions on each other. He expressed surprise that His Majesty, even in his youth, had never had a lady to worship by the rules of courtly love: the chaste, secret, and usually doomed adoration of a great lady one could never have, an adoration that compelled a man to relentless self-improvement in her honor, that compelled him to deeds of martial ferocity, spiritual generosity, and cultured sensitivity, that even compelled him, when given the choice between carnal satisfaction or poetry, to choose the poetry every time. Willem was openly disappointed that, in fact, nobody at court had such a lady.

“So at tournaments there are no knights carrying their lady’s favors?” he asked. He felt foolish for his curiosity about a subject that clearly meant little to the court.

“Oh, of course there are— kerchiefs and torn sleeves and all that rot,” Konrad said. “Usually the lady is the knight’s dowager great-aunt who is about to make her will, or the mother of the girl whose dowry he’s after.” Willem’s face fell, and the king chuckled suggestively. “You want a lady’s favor wrapped around your lance, is that it?”

Willem shrugged, not registering the double entendre. “Of course I’d like to earn that honor, but…I don’t know any ladies here.”

Konrad chuckled harder. “You can have Jouglet’s castoffs. Or we could simply have the seamstress make a pretty glove for you and you can invent yourself a lady. Then you don’t have to write bad poetry for anyone.”

Willem grimaced and tried to hide his disappointment. “Then there is truth to the rumor that chivalry is not valued in Germany as it is in France and Burgundy.”

“Of course it’s valued,” Konrad reassured him. “Any doctrine that tells armed men they are bettered by unflinching service and devotion to a superior is always valued in my court.”

Over the next ten dishes Willem was disabused— gently disabused, once Konrad saw how innocent he was— of most of his understandings about the courtly life. He learned how peculiar he was for refraining from bearing arms on Sundays. He learned how indulgent it was of him to consider the chivalric code of decent behavior as applying to the use of peasant women’s bodies— had not Andreas Capellanus himself advocated taking them by flattery and force? He learned he was naïve for fearing that traditional values such as honor and loyalty were lost by the increasing popularity of money in lieu of the stable interdependency of manor life. Konrad roared with laughter over that, trying to imagine what would happen to his empire if, for a single afternoon, he ruled as though loyalty were a stronger force than greed.

But however strange the emperor found Willem’s disposition on such matters, Konrad genuinely liked him for it. Though there were not two decades separating them, he felt almost paternal toward the young man; he was touched by Willem’s simplicity, and pleased to have found someone so artless who was yet skilled in the art of combat. Konrad had never thought much of Burgundians— (“They make pretty things, they pray well, but they’re dull for dinner conversation”)— and Willem was an unexpected delight. And so Konrad switched matters to more neutral ground— falconry, hunting, horsemanship. They discussed their mutual acquaintance the minstrel, and how uncannily each had felt, from the moment he’d met Jouglet (three years ago in Willem’s case, at least seven in Konrad’s), that they’d been friends a lifetime.

Paul, attempting as ever to insinuate himself into some conversation where he felt even marginally welcome, sarcastically suggested that such large, accomplished men as Konrad and Willem might square off to test each other’s mettle by trying, for example, to bash each other’s heads in. Willem took the cardinal seriously and begged off the idea, which tickled Konrad enough to want to try it out. He informed Willem that they would test their lances against each other’s next day outside the town walls. Willem was flustered and would have given up his helmet all over again to have had Jouglet in sight then. Afraid to contradict his sovereign, he agreed to it; he doubted he could win such a match, but then again, he was baffled as to whether he should even
try
to win it.

In late afternoon, he retrieved Atlas and his weapons from the stable in the lower courtyard and began the steep descent down the mountain, into the hilly vineyards, through the town gates, along the narrow, haphazard streets, and finally to the inn. He dismissed his servant from the room, sinking immediately onto the hard bed and letting out a sigh— more a groan— of psychic exhaustion.

“It’s easier once you are used to it,” promised Jouglet from the far corner.

Willem jumped, though he realized that he had somehow expected the minstrel to be there. “Come over here,” he ordered, and Jouglet did. Willem looked up at his friend wearily from the pillows. He seemed about to speak two or three times, then changed his mind and finally said, with a sigh, “I’m very glad to see you. Sup with me.”

I
n
the slate-and-amber-dappled dawn, Imogen was smiling languidly in her sleep. She shifted closer to Marcus’s leanly muscled frame, to snuggle against him, and he thought, for the thousandth time in those four days, that his heart might shatter with happiness. That this girl— and she was barely more than a girl— would sprout such unquestioning and passionate affection for him, a man almost old enough to be her father, was to him miraculous proof of God’s work among mankind.

Or perhaps the devil’s. This was so stupidly dangerous, what they had done, what they were doing. He was not a stupid man, and he had always been by nature too cautious to truck with danger. And when he was thinking straight— which he obviously had not been doing— he was far too protective of Imogen’s well-being to forget himself.

Alphonse, Count of Burgundy, was a man whom nobody at court had ever liked, a second son without sons of his own, desperate to secure his immortality by marrying his daughter well. Suggesting Marcus had been a ploy of Konrad’s— Marcus had the greatest authority within the royal court after Konrad himself, but no pedigree and no independent power. He was Konrad’s creature, a childhood companion who through merit and favor had earned an extraordinary position of authority. He had agreed to the match because he did not have the right to refuse it, and anyhow, he always did whatever Konrad wanted. Imogen’s mother, Monique, who had known Marcus for a lifetime, saw no impropriety in his meeting with Imogen when first they were betrothed; in fact Monique had requested it, to put her daughter’s mind at ease that her intended was a gentleman.

He had seen her a few times in passing as a young girl, but when she walked into Konrad’s chamber in Hagenau the day of their actual introduction, her face lit by the setting sun, he did not recognize even a trace of the child, she had bloomed and grown so beautiful. She looked at him and put a hand to her throat, gasping slightly. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, in a soft voice bursting with relief. “I wasn’t sure which one Father was referring to. I’m so glad it’s you.” That was all it took. It was what Jouglet, in those ridiculous French romances, would have called a
coup de foudre.
There was no explaining it. They did not take their gazes from each other for the entire conversation, and later neither of them could remember what they spoke about. He could not wrest her voice and eyes from his mind, and with no evidence he knew, with absolute certainty, that she was just as distracted by thoughts of him. He initiated an exchange of letters, and within six months they had arranged— it was her idea— to find a way to be alone together now and then.

Why, he wondered now,
why
had they kept something that innocent a secret? There had been an adolescent gleefulness in the secrecy; Marcus, who had never felt gleeful in his own adolescence, was seduced by it. The first time, when they had each ridden for days to this sequestered spot, he had not lain a finger on her despite his relentlessly throbbing erection; they talked for two days, then he’d kissed her hand and they had separated. She’d written to him as soon as she returned home, explaining how she had felt in his presence, artlessly detailing what he recognized as feminine arousal, and from their second visit on they never kept their hands and mouths off each other.