Revenge of the Rose (52 page)

“See who’s making the offer? I’m the one that helped to get him in here. You can be sure there is no love lost between us. I’m only here on king’s business.”

Dagger in hand, with nobody else to witness, Jouglet thrust a torch toward the cell, where Marcus sat chained and hunched on a pile of moldy straw, as if he were in mourning.

“Tell me why you did it,” Jouglet challenged.

Marcus pursed his lips shut.

“I know it was to keep Willem’s star from ascending. Admit to me why you feared such a thing.”

Marcus stared in defiant silence, but Jouglet sensed him wavering. Then he scowled. “Because I am a selfish, jealous, ambitious wretch who wanted to marry a rich girl for her land and position,” Marcus said in a monotone. “That is the entire truth.”

Jouglet considered him a moment. “I like a man who can keep a woman’s secrets,” the minstrel said decisively. Marcus looked up, alarmed. “But unfortunately, Marcus, certain things will not stay secret by your discretion or even your death.”

“I know that,” he snapped, miserable.

“Do you know about the child?”

Marcus scrambled to his feet, gaping. Having stood, he panicked and sat down again.

“Apparently not,” Jouglet observed.

Marcus began to breathe hard, which in the fetid air of the room instantly nauseated him. “Oh God. What have I done to her?” He leapt up again, pounded his head against the stone wall so hard he stunned himself, and crumpled to his knees. He stood up as if he were going to do it again.

“Stop!” Jouglet interjected sharply, and rattled the door to the cell. Marcus began to pull at his own hair, then fell to the ground, sobbing with deeper grief than Jouglet had ever seen in a man. Even Willem had had rage to animate his distress; this was pure self-recrimination.

Then he looked up at her, his reddened eyes almost frightening in their intense anger. His strong, narrow features were grotesquely exaggerated in the lamplight. “If she comes to harm because of this I will haunt you from beyond the grave until you repent ever bringing Willem of Dole to this court. She is an
innocent,
Jouglet, she was misled by her own heart, not by ambition— “

“Shut up and come outside,” Jouglet said brusquely. She took the key from the porter’s stand and unlocked the door with one hand, holding out the dagger warningly with the other. Marcus stared at her. She gestured to his arm-chain, and after a confused moment, he held out his wrist; she unlocked the chain. “Remember, you’re my prisoner.” He stumbled half-crawling out of the cell, then stood up passively, still gasping for breath. She reached up to wrap an arm around his bare shoulders and pressed the knife against his throat. “I am about to do something very, very foolish, and if you annoy me one jot further I will change my mind about it,” she explained, hissing, into his ear.

And then they were behind the gatehouse, in the darkness, by the mare, and Jouglet was untying the garish cloak. “Here,” she said. “Put this on, draw the hood.”

“What are you— “

“Shut up,” Jouglet said evenly. “Take the dagger. Get on the horse. Most of your coin worth is in the saddlebags. She’s waiting for you near the southern gate of town, and they will let you go through without a question as long as you do not reveal yourself.”

Marcus was speechless.

“Hurry up,” she ordered. “I’ve a wedding feast to get back to.”

“Jouglet— “

“Go on now.”

“Where do we go?”

“I don’t know,” Jouglet said. “I would head for France or even Flanders if I were you. Get out of the empire, at least. Now
go,
” she insisted abruptly, and ran back into the porthouse.

The guard returned eventually, a little drunk, and glancing into the cell saw the figure he expected to see, curled up on the pile of musty straw.

Then the figure uncurled, stood up, and turned out to be not whom he expected.

“Hell!” the guard shouted in alarm. “What’s going on?”

“Forgive my impersonation,” Jouglet said, “But we are now both in a lot of trouble unless you do exactly as I tell you.”

Jouglet passed through the thinned-out crowds in the square and reentered the archbishop’s palace. She crossed the twenty paces of the hall to join Willem at the foot of the dais, and bowed deeply to the new empress.

“Your Majesty will forgive me a moment to converse with your esteemed brother?” Jouglet said.

Lienor was obviously delighted that it was in her power to dictate her brother’s freedom of movement. “I’m afraid he must remain sequestered,” she informed Jouglet, eyelashes fluttering precociously. “Until we can marry him off. For his own safety.” Then she laughed and let them go. Konrad watched the three of them, liking their easy intimacy and affection, something generally so absent from his court. It mitigated his still-stunned grief about Marcus, at least a little.

The Count of Burgundy was moving toward the dais, so Jouglet led Willem to the far corner near the chapel door. “There has been a change of plan,” she said quietly. “You will not marry Imogen.”

Willem shrugged, looking tired. “Very well, what is your new game?”

“It is not my game, friend. Marcus has trumped us.”

He frowned. “Marcus? But he— “

“Ah!” She held up a hand warningly to quiet him, then lowering her voice to a whisper explained, “He’s gone. They’re both gone.”

Willem looked relieved, which annoyed Jouglet but did not at all surprise her.

“No, this is
bad
news,” she explained. “You have lost the dowry land.”

“I have gained an empress for a sister,” he said. “I will not be left to starve. All you strove for will be accomplished. Your work is completed, Jouglet.”

“No!” Jouglet said stiffly. “
Your
land. What Alphonse took from you. I want him to have to give it back to you. That was the
point.
That was why all of this was started!”

Willem looked at her strangely for a moment. “Poetic justice is not necessary when normal justice will suffice,” he informed her. Suddenly he grinned. “I’m
not
the romantic one, Jouglet.
You
are.” He was delighted with this insight.

Jouglet scowled. “For such a base insult I may have to challenge you to mortal combat.”

“I accept,” he said. “We still have a private room at the inn. Let’s wrestle there tonight. The scent of your inner arm, just above the elbow, has been on my nostrils all day.”

To her surprise, this made her blush. “Thank God
you’re
not romantic!” she muttered with forced exasperation to the air.

There was a murmur from the thinning crowd, and they turned to see the source of it: the guard from the western gate, tutored by Jouglet to look distraught, ran into the hall and sprinted toward the dais. “That’s the news of Marcus, and I must address it,” she said, turning to Willem. His brown eyes were gentle and affectionate, and she let herself admit she wanted more of him. Between his illness, her irritation at his sullenness, and Konrad’s Galahad admonishments, they had not made love in nearly a week. “But when I’m done— ” She nodded toward the chapel door. “Just for a few moments,” she added warningly when she saw the smile creep into the corner of Willem’s eyes.

There was a growing hubbub by the dais, and Jouglet hurried toward it.

“Do not pursue the scoundrel, sire,” she heard Lienor saying. The bride looked relieved by the news. It was a touching look, genuine humanity— a break in the silly masquerade she was so brilliantly carrying off. “Surely it is enough that he is gone from court.”

Konrad’s face was a neutral mask barely hiding painfully conflicting emotion. Then Jouglet caught his eye and nodded very slightly, with a subtle hand movement:
let it be.
The emperor made a brief, involuntary gesture, a shudder of relief, and then was in control again. “Very well,” he announced grimly, taking Lienor’s hand as if he were already familiar with it. “In honor of my bride, and her clemency, we grant amnesty to Marcus of Aachen, our former steward, so long as he never resurfaces within the borders of our Empire.”

“Do not ever again try to give me away in marriage,” Willem whispered as they untied each other’s breeches in the dubious privacy of the small chapel. Steadying himself against the doorjamb, he pushed himself up into her. She gasped a little and fell back against the chapel wall. He pulled her closer, gently, so that she leant her weight against him, against his great broad chest. She could feel and hear his heart thumping, and realized with childlike pleasure that his pulse matched hers exactly. Despite the differences in their temperament she realized there was no one else she felt so near to, no one else she knew so well, or with whom she enjoyed such genuine companionship.

There was no one else. But there was one who came very close, to whom she owed a final revelation.

The royal newlyweds had just allowed themselves to get dragged into a conversation with Paul about church dogma. The festivities were waning, and emperor and empress, still surrounded on three sides of the dais by guards, were trying their hand at small talk. Konrad, having never bothered to converse much at all with a lady, ever, was pleasantly surprised by what he’d married.

The cardinal had been presumptuous enough to climb to the top step of the dais, and his head was now slightly higher than either of theirs. “I understand the area around Dole has been troubled by heretics of late,” Paul was saying to Her Majesty in studied terms. “Particularly among the minor aristocracy. A young lady near the border was burned at the stake by a mob, wasn’t she? The church does not sanction such a thing, but we cannot, alas, prevent it.”

Konrad almost laughed, and was going to make fun of his brother’s obvious and leaden desperation, but changed his mind. He wanted to see how his bride would respond.

Lienor lowered her eyes and smiled demurely, letting them know she realized she was being baited. “I do not concern myself much with serious matters, Your Eminence, or with matters much beyond my own doorway. As for heresy, we have been poor, but my brother keeps a chaplain and our uncle kindly built a wooden chapel in our courtyard. If there are dangerous currents about, I assure you they’re in waters I do not swim.” The slightest pause. And then with the demure cheekiness that was her hallmark, she concluded, “So if you are seeking discreet entrée into such a world, you will have to ask someone else. Perhaps your uncle? He knows Burgundy’s naughty secrets better than
any
one.”

Konrad laughed aloud as Paul reddened. Lienor’s charming expression and bearing had not changed in the least. Now she raised her head a little and smiled warmly at someone across the room. Paul no longer impinged on her serene consciousness.

Willem had reentered the hall, and a moment later Jouglet backed out of the chapel, crossing herself ostentatiously. At Lienor’s happy gesturing, they both returned to the foot of the dais, where Willem declined the emperor’s invitation to watch his sister laid down in her marriage bed. Jouglet cried with poetic license that seeing Her Majesty in another lover’s arms would be too hard to bear, and likewise begged off from the revelry. Lienor was finally escorted away by one of the old archbishop’s serving girls, but she was not a dozen paces across the hall when she exercised her new-won power and announced, delighting in the liberty to do it, that she wished to be entirely unescorted. This was very irregular, but she did not care. From a tour of the palace just after the wedding vows, she knew where the bedchamber was and how to get there— and anyhow it was just up the steps by the chapel, where she wanted one final moment of maidenly solitude to offer thanks to her Savior. The maid left her with a candle and she sauntered with slow, superior giddiness across the rest of the hall before disappearing into the deep shadows of the chapel door.

As the last revelers staggered in search of whatever paths would take them to their beds, Jouglet directed a clandestine wink at Willem and seemed to disappear.

She went to keep a solemn date she had made more than three years earlier.

E
ntering
the chapel, silent as a cat, she pulled the door closed. The dark room now had one beeswax candle lit, wavering on the altar in a bronze enameled holder. There was a high window behind the altar, made of little soldered squares of bluish-greyish-green. The two young figures looked across the empty space at each other without speaking, without moving.

After a moment, Jouglet slipped over toward Lienor and performed a deep and elaborate bow. “My lady,” the minstrel intoned with exaggerated lofty diction. “Behold, for I have made you queen of all you survey, and yet this is hardly a trifle of what I would give you to express the profundity of my regard.”

Lienor tugged Jouglet’s hand to make the minstrel rise. “You are the most remarkable woman in the world,” she whispered, and kissed Jouglet softly on the cheek. They embraced, arms clenched around each other, and stood there in silence. Then at the same moment they began to laugh.

Lienor drew Jouglet to an elaborately carved chest against the far wall, holding one of Jouglet’s hands in hers and with her other, gently stroking the minstrel’s sun-freckled face. “This is the first moment I feel I can relax since you left us in Dole back in June,” she whispered. “You astonish me. You really did it! You have been truly brilliant.”

“I’ve also been extremely foolish, and there is nothing I can do about it. I must tell you something, Lienor.” Jouglet hesitated and took a deep breath, afraid to look Lienor in the face. She let the breath out, then after an awkward pause took another breath. Finally she blurted out, with almost motherly compassion, “Willem and I are lovers.”

For a moment Lienor looked breathlessly startled, and Jouglet tensed. Then very slowly a shadow of a smile crossed Lienor’s face, and a moment later she was laughing, almost giggling. She threw her arms around Jouglet and pulled her close to her on the chest. “Both economical and tasteful of you!”