Revenge of the Rose (38 page)

“Take the sword, Lienor,” Maria said in an unsteady voice, eyes on Erec. Lienor could barely lift it, but she stood it upright with the tip on the ground and the hilt grasped hard in both her shaking hands.

“As God is my witness, nephew, she never even saw him from an upstairs window. They would not know each other if they met in the street.” She turned the blade of the knife toward herself and offered the handle to Erec. “Kill me if you must punish the wrongdoer.”

“Mother,” Lienor said in a raspy voice, horrified.

Erec looked back and forth between them, unnerved by each one’s attitude. “M-Marcus said you seduced him. Marcus is an honest man,” he insisted, trying not to sound uncertain.

“I am an honest mother, and this is your honest cousin,” Maria said firmly and offered him the knife once again.

Finally composed enough to wipe her face dry, Lienor demanded miserably, “Does my brother believe this of me?”

“Yes,”
Erec said defiantly, regaining a bit of his righteousness. “As does His Majesty, of course.”

In an even more defeated, vulnerable voice, she asked softly, “Does Jouglet the minstrel?”

“No,” he said after a pause, the righteousness immediately deflated.

“Do you?” she whispered.

He stared up at her, and she met his gaze, sniffling, her eyes red from the sobbing, her whole body trembling within the robe. After an agonized moment he grabbed the knife from Maria and hurled it across the room.

“Oh my God, what have I done,” he murmured in a nauseated voice, and dissolving into tears he threw himself at his cousin’s feet.

E
rec
moved the pieces of fruit, breadstuffs, and tableware back to their starting places, and gave his cousin a solicitous look. “Does it make more sense now?” he asked.

Maria, hovering over her daughter, pointed to a saltcellar. “Why is that one Marcus?” she demanded. “Make Marcus a rotten bit of turnip.”

Lienor smiled despite her exhaustion. “You’re missing the point, Mama.” She patted Erec’s hand. “Let me see if I can follow.” She pointed to each item on the table. “The gold brooch is the emperor, who has promised to marry; his brother the cardinal— who would manipulate the marriage for the pope’s benefit— is the bunch of grapes, and the pope is the wine; Alphonse of Burgundy, from whose county the royal bride must come, is the heel of bread, in a bowl of bread crumbs, which represent all the other nobility.” She held up a flower with a tired smile. “I am the rose. The jasmine is the daughter of Besançon, who is devoted to the pope and vassal to the Count of Burgundy. Marcus the emperor’s steward, who slandered me, is the salt, and Willem is the knife.” She sighed. “Quite a board you’ve set here.”

“Can you track it so far?” Erec asked gently. He was trying desperately to make amends and, having no experience at it, imagined how Jouglet might act. He thought the minstrel would arm Lienor with knowledge, but he was not sure he had it straight himself.

Lienor delicately picked up both the rose and the sprig of jasmine and placed them by the gold-foil brooch with Konrad’s eagle on it. “On August first, in Mainz, His Majesty will announce which one of us he’ll marry. Jouglet and Willem want him to marry me— and so does Alphonse of Burgundy, which is completely unexpected. Everybody else wants him to marry the Besançon heiress. And now His Majesty and all the others believe me to be a harlot.” A pause. “Still why would the steward do this?”

Erec shook his head. “I cannot begin to guess.”

“And are there any other rude developments I should know about?”

Erec thought a moment. “Not that I’m aware of.”

Lienor frowned at the props and pointed as she spoke, her hand darting haltingly over the collection as if she were slowly tracing the flight of a distracted bee. “Either the steward
wants
Konrad to marry Besançon, or he wants to
prevent
Konrad’s marrying me. If, as you say, Konrad trusts the steward and distrusts Cardinal Paul, then the steward is unlikely to be helping Paul, so I doubt the steward is for Besançon.” She considered briefly. “On the other hand, if I became the empress, Willem would outrank the steward in court, and the steward wants to prevent that for some reason. What might the steward lose if Willem suddenly outranked him? Does he have expectations that haven’t been secured yet?”

“He’s engaged to Alphonse of Burgundy’s daughter,” Erec said, with a shrug. “Has been for years, as I hear it.”

She blinked in surprise. “A
ministerial
is engaged to a
future countess
?” Then she smiled, plucked a cherry from the bowl of fruit farther down the table, and lay it between the saltcellar and the knife, continuing her graceful semaphoric exercise with more confidence. “That’s the daughter, and that explains it all.” Speaking rapidly, and emphasizing each player as she pointed to their symbol: “The
steward
doesn’t want to be passed over in favor of
Willem,
and
Alphonse
would break the betrothal in a heartbeat if he could instead marry his
daughter
to the
empress’s brother.
That’s what’s going on here.
That’s
why
Alphonse
wants
me
to marry
Konrad
despite…” She glanced up to see her cousin and her mother both staring at her, dumbfounded.

“What?” she said reasonably. “Surely you aren’t so simple to think the Count of Burgundy wanted to see me empress because he considers me a nice young lady?”

Maria was speechless, and Erec scrambled for words. “How…how could you sort all that out so quickly? How did your mind come to
work
that way?”

She smiled her shy-coquettish smile. “From listening to Jouglet speak of courtly scandal, I suppose. I was always a more studious audience than my brother was.”

Erec shook his head, astonished. “And what does your scandalous education tell you we should do now?”

Lienor mused on the concert of props before her. “Is it possible to set out tomorrow morning and reach Koenigsbourg before Konrad leaves for the Mainz Assembly?”

Erec calculated. “Yes. It would be close, but he planned to leave the morning after the feast of St. Anne. That gives me four days.”

Lienor stood up, her fingertips pressed against the trestle table for balance. “No,” she corrected, trying to sound confident. “It gives
us
four days.”

W
hen
Jouglet had returned alone from town, after following Willem there from his aborted castle breakfast, Konrad realized the young knight would need time. His Majesty was moved by the depths of Willem’s feeling, and privately willing to be lenient— but not willing to appear so to the general view. So for the remainder of that day he never mentioned Willem’s name and lost all apparent interest in the knight’s existence. He gave Jouglet orders to check on Willem in the evening— but he gave these orders in private, and so obliquely that when Jouglet returned with no news of improvement, they could each pretend Konrad had never wanted any, anyhow.

The next morning, and the next again, Jouglet’s attempts to conjure Willem to the castle were thwarted by the knight’s disappearing into the hills on Atlas. He left word with his servant that he was flushing out bandits, valiantly protecting His Majesty’s highway. Since this was— unbeknownst to him— a duty Konrad meted out to the lower-ranking knights of his donjon, neither minstrel nor emperor found the proclamation very helpful.

The third morning, Konrad said simply, without preamble, “That’s enough. Get him here or send him home. Today.”

S
he
had ignored Erec’s warnings of highwaymen and wolves, turned a deaf ear on her mother’s cries that she would die of sun exposure or be dishonored by some local lord through whose lands they might pass. “I am going to clear my name,” she kept saying, as if it were a prayer or chant, and began with her own hands to pack necessities. Chief among these, for her plan, was a virginal white gown, almost prudish, and all the jewelry she could carry. The night before she’d wrapped it all in two layers of linen within a leather pouch, and then put the whole thing into a saddlebag. Erec, despairing of talking her out of this, and knowing better than she did what she was in for, took the extra step of wrapping both his cousin and her baggage in the foulest things he could bear to offer her, so she would look like a poor nun with a ragged linen veil across her face.

Appearing decidedly eccentric and not the least attractive, Lienor collected what she naively thought would be enough biscuits and dried meat to hold them for the trip. Then she kissed her mother, anointed herself with holy water from the container by the door, said a prayer to St. Appolinarus, whose feast day it was, and stepped out into the dawn fog to call for her horse.

J
ouglet
rapped sharply on the door and was let in by a worried-looking page boy. Willem sat staring bleakly out the window, a drab, thick wool blanket wrapped around him, looking like an invalid. Jouglet, as infuriated as she was, did feel for him, but she chastised him in front of the page boys; he responded with grumbles and coded requests for fornication. He was not nearly as upset by Lienor’s supposed behavior as he was by her supposed deception, and almost above all he was upset by his own contribution toward it. “I turned her into someone who would do this to me,” he said with pained, fatalistic resignation.

“Heavens,” Jouglet retorted. “So you are both the offender
and
the victim. That takes dexterity, Willem. I’m so impressed.”

He smiled at her weakly, sheepishly, and sent the page boys from the room. “Come here?” he said with a gesture, so tentative it sounded like a question. “I know you think I deserve a chiding— “

“You deserve a lot worse than that,” Jouglet corrected sharply, staying by the door. “You’re lucky Konrad has been indulgent— but he’s through with indulgence now. You are to return to the castle today, or you’ll be sent back to Dole. His orders.”

“He’d do better to give me some errand far away,” Willem answered, making a face. “Tell him to send me on assignment somewhere distant. Then nobody at court can see me grieving, yet I’ll be known to be in His Majesty’s service.”

Jouglet was so surprised by this reasoning, it took her a moment to think of a retort. “The court travels to Mainz in less than a week, and you must stay near Konrad.”

He sighed tiredly and gestured again; she crossed to his stool near the window. “I’ve lived, and tried to raise her, by a courtly code of ethics, and it’s all been a sham.” He folded his arms around her waist and buried his face against her abdomen, like a little boy wanting to be cradled.

Jouglet bit her lip and looked away from him. “I’m not your mother,” she said stiffly, and pushed him away. “I’m your escort to the king.”

“I just can’t face going back there. I’m trying,” he said, almost voiceless. “I know I’m disappointing you, but I am
trying
to live up to your ridiculously impossible vision of me.”

“It’s not impossible,” she said sharply. “I know what you’re capable of. I’ve seen it. You are a magnificent soul, Willem. You’re being
incredibly
stupid and pigheaded at the moment, but generally you’re a magnificent soul, and Konrad knows that.” She softened, tipped his chin up to look at him directly. “You’re even magnificent in ways he has no knowledge of.”

As if he’d been waiting for a cue, Willem pulled her down onto his lap, locked his arms around her shoulders, and kissed her hard on the lips. Taken by surprise, she let him for a moment. But then she pushed away against his chest, although she remained seated on his lap. “That’s a bad idea.”

“Paul can’t see us here,” he said. He rubbed his warm lips across her throat, and her body automatically pushed up closer against his. “I know he’s always seeking moral cracks,” he murmured into her ear, “but he can’t see any cracks in this room at all.” With a suggestive, hopeful little smile he moved his hand between her thighs.

“I was not referring to Paul,” Jouglet said, rolling her eyes a little. She pushed away again, now just perching on his knees. “You must redirect your amorous intentions in a more public and courtly direction.”

“You used to say that like you meant it,” Willem observed, his attention turning to her belt-tie, which he began to undo. “Now it just sounds like something you say out of habit or desperation, the way Paul utters blessings.”

He was right. For the first time in her memory, it bothered her to think some artificial creature’s rouged lips and oiled, flowing tresses might, even accidentally, become valued over her own unanointed body. It felt good— too good— to see the look on Willem’s face as he steadily untied her belt. This was getting messy. This was not how she had planned it. She pushed him back by the shoulder. “You
must
return to the castle
today,
it’s an
order.
”

Willem gestured to his unkempt self. “Showing up in this state would be as bad as not showing up at all. But I’m in need of exercise, and there don’t seem to be any bandits in the local hills. So either help me to a distant assignment or indulge me in some other exercise.” He tugged on her belt again.

She knew she would never get him back to Konrad’s court by rewarding his absence from it with off-site fornication. If reason and self-interest could not lure him up the mountainside, she decided, then she would use whatever other bait was handy, however inglorious. So she put her hands over his and removed them from her belt, then removed herself from his lap, and left the room without a word, ignoring his surprised, imploring protest. A few hours later, back at the castle, she sent a message written in Burgundian and delivered by a boy she trusted and paid well, vowing that their next tumble would be in the cellar of Koenigsbourg, or nowhere.