The chilling breeze was probably coming from what was currently a stormy North Sea, its damp, icy air mounting the curtain wall and sweeping down into the open courtyard. Many of the neighbors, all cloaked, were already there. Even the King, bundled in furs, was there on a small platform, sitting above the crowd in the new armchair with the leopard heads, now finished, at the end of the arm rests.
Jim remembered that his royal self was not officially supposed to be present. Jim, like everybody, had been briefed to address him—only if highly necessary—as Sir Jack Straw, an obvious nom d'etat.
And there was Brian, with Dafydd already beside him, in the small clear space at one side of the steps. Neither was cloaked. Brian was wearing a startlingly white, silk, fur-lined cote-hardi with tight blue sleeves above blue hose. That cote-hardi was something he would never have wasted money on himself. It would have been Geronde's choice and purchase. Dafydd's hose and jacket were both forest green—clothes that did not violate the sumptuary laws against common men dressing above their class, but worn with that strange elegance Dafydd seemed able to achieve with everything he wore, handled, or used.
Everybody was standing, waiting. One necessary person was not there.
"Where's Geronde?" Jim asked Angie.
"I don't know?" she said. "I'll go find out."
She vanished back into the Great Hall. Jim went on to join Brian, taking the opposite side from Dafydd.
Brian was looking both grim and tense. Unusually so. It was obviously not the moment to begin asking him about Geronde's scar. Also, Jim would just as soon not even Dafydd should suspect Jim's part in the attempt to remove it.
But, with the moment so close, now, Jim found his need to know like an ache inside him. He discovered himself praying internally, an unusual activity for him.
But he could wait, he told himself. Geronde would be coming out in a few minutes.
"Damned bastard!" growled Brian, under his breath.
"Easy, Brian," he murmured. "Easy! What did he do?"
"Nothing," Brian muttered. "He just keeps standing there and staring at me as if I was a cockroach in his pudding! That's what's so maddening about it."
"Things will start and then he'll have to pay attention instead to what's going on. Ignore him."
"Not by-our-Lady easy!" answered Brian. But he deliberately looked away from de Chaney to stare instead at Malvern's Steward, who had already mounted importantly to the second of the three steps to the chapel door, proudly carrying a roll of parchment in his left hand.
There was a sudden stir in the standing, watching, cloaked crowd. Geronde had just appeared out of the door to the Great Hall, Angie and Danielle with her. The crowd stared.
She was wearing a lady's version of the same male-fashion cote-hardi Brian and Jim were wearing—a garment interestingly called, Jim remembered, a Hell's Window.
The cote-hardi was sleeveless, showing her lower arms tightly clothed by the sleeves of a rich, dark blue gown, trimmed with white silk. The Hell's Window also had slits down each side to reveal more of the gown, and a wide belt was worn low around her hips as a knight's belt was worn. It was also made in the same way—a belt of joined plaques—not of steel plaques, but lacy silver ones enameled in floral designs.
The Hell's Window was also open in front to show a row of tiny buttons down the front of the dark blue dress, and her golden hair was completely loose—it would be put up only after she had become a married woman.
Jim looked eagerly at Geronde's face. He saw no scar. Belatedly, he remembered that the left-handed de Bois had, of course, slashed her right cheek.
To get to the chapel, Geronde and her party had necessarily turned left when coming out of the Great Hall door, so the side of her face with the scar was still hidden from where Jim stood with Brian, at the far side of the steps. Only when Jim got a look at the right side of her face would he know.
It was a comforting explanation. But in spite of its reasonableness, he felt a small, cold, sinking feeling inside him. For one thing, those who could now see the right side of her face were not acting as if they could see anything different about her. The eyes of all—particularly those of the women—were all on her clothes. Jim pushed the whole question sternly from him. In time, he would see.
Geronde, Angie and Danielle came to the right side of the steps and halted there. The priest from Geronde's castle came out of the chapel door, pulling the hood of his white alb up to cover his head.
He was the only person there, besides those involved in the wedding, who could not indulge himself in a cloak. He was wearing only the alb for outer garment, but presumably, Jim thought, like everyone else he must have extra clothes beneath it.
With the tonsure on his head now covered, he looked, more than anything, as a representative of Holy Church addressing a group of pilgrims about to go on a pilgrimage.
"We are here gathered together," he said now, in clear baritone voice—and the crowd stilled its busy murmurings about Geronde's clothing and their probable cost and style."—to witness the marriage of Sir Brian Neville-Smythe and Lady Geronde Isabel de Chaney. We will now hear the reading of the marriage contract."
He stepped backwards a little to put the closed door of the chapel at his shoulder blades, to cut off the wind from circling around him quite so cruelly.
The Steward moved to the center of the second step and unrolled the first six inches of his scroll, holding it at arms length, and began to read loudly.
Chapter Forty-Six
What the Steward read began with a long screed written in English, but also in heavy legal language, understandable but ornate.
It began by naming the parties involved, their ancestries and social positions, and the financial arrangements concerned with the marriage, at the present moment and in case of certain future developments. From there it descended into particulars of these matters and the basis upon which the contract had been drawn up.
The visitors in the courtyard wrapped their cloaks more tightly around them, pulled their hoods over their heads as far as they would go, and listened in silence.
It might be, thought Jim, that a fair share of them were actually interested in this long declamation, hoping to learn something more than they already knew of Geronde's prospects and Castle Malvern's worth and wealth.
But Jim himself paid little attention. He found his attention was all on Geronde—and he had been mentally sending a message to turn her head enough to let him see her other cheek.
She did not oblige.
In spite of his keen desire to see for himself, the worry he had been struggling to keep out of his mind stayed with him. Had Brian's determination to do what Jim had suggested yesterday, failed? Jim's theory had been that if the right conditions could be arranged, Son Won Phon's magick could still take effect. But what if he had been wrong? Or—there was an ugly possibility that Son Won Phon's magick could already have lost its power to effect a change, magick spells unfulfilled did not hang around for long, he already knew that…
Most special magicks like this either worked without delay, or did not work at all. The power of this one might have been gone in only a few hours, if not less. If he had failed in his theory to make it work… if it didn't, what should he do—what could he do? He would have failed to achieve what he had hoped, and worse than that, raised expectations in Brian that could not be fulfilled.
A great wedding present, he thought unhappily, for two of his best friends on their long-awaited wedding day.
He felt the cold certainty of failure growing in him. To fight it off, he told himself that years of practice, conscious and unconscious, had made Geronde expert in unthinkingly hiding the marred side of her face from the gaze of others. But the thought did not seem to help.
—A sudden interruption in the Steward's reading, sudden unexpected words from Brian, and following movements by everyone on the steps jerked him out of his thoughts.
Like most people, Jim was capable of listening to and watchi
ng something while engaged in his own thoughts. But it took him a moment now to reconstruct what the Steward had just said, and what had happened.
The Steward had just been reading off the number and descriptions of personal keepsakes and love-tokens from Brian that Geronde was bringing with her to the marriage, and which would now legally belong to Brian, but which actually they would now share together.
The reading had included a little ceremony in which a few coins on a plate were passed from Geronde to Brian, as token of the fact she brought all she owned and would own to him. But then the Steward had gone on to announce an entirely unusual addition…
"…including," he had said, "those small gifts most loved and prized by Lady Geronde Isabel de Chaney, which Sir Brian Neville-Smythe hath made her from time to time, but any of which he may ask back from Geronde de Chaney at any moment, and instantly be given them as surety for her evermore undying love and faith in him—"
At that moment, Brian had unexpectedly spoken, in a firm, carrying voice that silenced the Steward by both its unexpectedness and its authority.
"Then I do chose now that which I latest gave her!"
It was that announcement that had brought Jim fully back to what was taking place, and he now saw its results:
Geronde's hand darted in through the right-hand parting of her Hell's Window, to draw forth—with effort—a sausagelike, leather-wrapped bundle. It was apparently weighty, for she used both hands to hold it out as Brian took a step forward to relieve her of it. Out of the ranks of her wedding party, her father took two lunging steps forward—but found the diminutive form of Geronde blocking his path. Brian went one step only back to his original position, handed the bundle to Dafydd and stood waiting.
The sausage had to be, Jim knew, the capful of gold pieces donated by the Prince and won by Brian when he had been champion of the tournament held as part of the Earl of Somerset's annual Christmas party. Brian had given it to Geronde for safe-keeping—she planned to use it for rebuilding Smythe Castle, and trusted not even Brian with it until this could be done.
Until she was married, all Geronde had was theoretically the property of her father, who had been trying to get his hands on that small fortune ever since she had gotten it. The control of Malvern Castle and its lands, however, had long been in Geronde's hands, and the servants and men-at arms were her people—enough so, at least, after the long absences of her father, that he was unable to use force to take the gold from her.
And if Sir Geoffrey had indeed tried to take the gold, Geronde was prepared to use any means, including violence, to resist—and all the people of the castle would have backed her up. Stranger things had happened in the fourteenth century.
Her father's legal rights were one thing. His coming up with financing for the law, or to muster an armed force to enforce it against a daughter who held the present power, was quite another. Geronde might be a stern Chatelaine, but she was a beloved one—followers would take a strong ruler over a weak one any day: the chance of personal survival was better.
So Geronde had held the money safely, but there was a problem looming in the necessary marriage contract. Unless she could legally return the gold to Brian, she and he could be liable under law in the future if Sir Geoffrey should regain the wealth by trying to take back his legal property.
But now Geronde had found a way to pass the money back to Brian, legally—and before witnesses. Sir Geoffrey's face was suddenly ugly.
Brian's face, however, Jim saw, had lost all of its previous grimness and tension. It was relaxed now, almost cheerful, looking steadily into the eyes of Sir Geoffrey. This day had finally served up something he was used to. He could have been posing for a statue that was to have the words Come and get it! engraved on its pedestal.
Sir Geoffrey stood still. He, Brian, nor anyone else watching was wearing sword or even dagger on this happy occasion. But even if both Sir Geoffrey and Brian had been armed, Geronde's father was twenty-six years older than Brian—and, worse, he was carrying half again that number of pounds in unseemly fat. Even shorn of these differences, no one there would have considered him a match for Brian.
The frozen, silent moment stretched out. In spite of his disadvantages, it was not impossible that Sir Geoffrey, as much a child of the fighting upper class of this historic time as any man there, might have thrown himself at Brian anyway, in a blind fit of rage, but already the spectators had begun to give up hope of that and were beginning to whisper among themselves over the excitement of a possible scandal. From his fur nest within his chair, the King himself (Sir Straw) was looking at the group on the steps with stern disapproval.
Still meeting Brian's eyes with an expression now of undying hatred, Sir Geoffrey also took a long step back, and the Steward, obviously badly rattled, took up again the reading of the wedding contract.
Eventually, to everybody's relief, it ended. The priest turned and started leading the wedding party and all the other favored guests into the chapel where they were out of the wind and their own body warmth would soon moderate the cold of the small, crowded place. He, himself, dodged into the cubbyhole which was the sacristy, and closed its door behind him.
Brian and Geronde, with the two wedding parties—Brian's and hers—had been first to follow into the interior of the chapel, where the only daylight came from a window over the door, made up of the same sort of small, uncolored, six-inch square glass panes which filled the Solar windows. The only other illumination was from the two candles on the altar, those in the hands of two acolytes, and a few more around the walls.
In this dim space, Geronde's loose golden blond hair caught the yellow light of the candles, making her seem to light up the dusky interior of the chapel just by her presence. She and Brian went directly up to the first of the three steps to the altar, with their wedding parties behind them, followed by a little space, and then the crowd of favored neighbors filling the rest of the chapel to its open door. Beyond the door, crowded even closer, were the less-favored visitors—outside, but closely listening.
All this gathering parted like a sea to allow the King, still on his chair and dais, to be carried in to a place right behind the wedding parties—its bulk, incidentally, forcing some of the furthest neighbors already inside, back out beyond the door.
Meanwhile, those still inside were taking off their cloaks and folding them into pads they could kneel upon. Actual pads had already been placed for Brian, Geronde and the members of the wedding parties. Jim stared about him, his eyes adjusting to the dimness of the chapel interior.
He had seen it in all its disorder and with the dirt of the years when Sir Hugh de Bois and his men had owned Malencontri—its walls stripped of anything religious and valuable, the glass of the window above the doorway knocked out, its frame empty.
He had also seen it some days ago, swept, cleaned, empty, its altar scrubbed and the broken-out windowpanes replaced with the cheaper, uncolored squares it presently held as a temporary measure.
But only now was he seeing the little chapel properly refurnished, a bronze cross on the wall above the altar—itself hardly more than a narrow shelf, its inner edge fastened to the wall behind it. To Jim's left, there was a carved Madonna, with the Christ Child in her arms, freshly painted and gilded—no doubt rescued from who knew what dusty corner.
Under the bronze cross two candles in two tall bronze candlesticks burned upon the altar. The two youthful acolytes in their dark robes, standing each at an end of the altar, also carried lighted candles.
In the dusky chapel, this candlelight fell on the beautifully worked frontal of the altar cloth. Angie had mentioned some weeks back that Geronde had had it worked for her wedding in the close stitch called opus anglicanum ("english-work" said Jim's mind, automatically translating the Latin name). This after her attempts to duplicate that highly professional work herself had reduced her to tears. In tiny close gold and white stitches, the frontal showed two kneeling angels facing each other with a golden cross betwe
en them.
Those behind the wedding parties were holding their folded cloaks ready for use, and whispering or murmuring. Brian and Geronde were alone on the first of the three steps up to the altar—all else present, including the wedding parties, shared the level floor.
The priest came out of the sanctuary, having taken off his alb. He was now in his white chasuble and stole. He crossed himself.
"In Patri nomine et spiritu sancti…" he said, and began the service. Jim heard the Latin words in a strange double fashion at first.
It had not happened that way when he had been in this world's France. There, for some reason undoubtedly magical, but which he had yet to fathom, everyone had seemed to speak the same language he had encountered in England.
The same thing had happened when he and Brian were in the Holy Land. People who must be speaking Arabic had also seemed to Jim to speak the identical language he had heard in the two northern countries. But in Dafydd's legendary Drowned Land, the local language had been unintelligible.
Here and now, however, he heard the words in Latin, which he had understood from his studies before he came to this world, and his mind automatically translated them into the upper-class fourteenth-century English with which he was now familiar. In just a short time, however, the two different versions blended together in his head and understanding was automatic.
But the priest was now well into the form for Solemnization of Matrimony, and Jim found himself wondering how closely the guests behind him were following it. It came to him that probably all of them were familiar enough with the ceremony, even if not with Latin, to follow what was being said.
The Dragon and the Fair M Page 49
