Queen of Swords

by Queen of Swords (retail) (epub)

  “God’s feet,” he said to the gate. “You drive me straight to distraction. But ah God – ah, lady, how I do love you.”

  Twenty-Two

  While Bertrand courted Helena, a dance both delicate and prolonged, two very different dances played themselves out in the High Court of Jerusalem. The first was expected, a dance of war and treachery. The second was perhaps inevitable, but no one had looked for it.

  The second followed upon the first, though it was not precisely born of it. In the first dance, after a winter of rising discontent, the Princess Alys rose up again in Antioch. This time she had the sense not to look to the infidels for allies. She turned instead toward good Frankish malcontents.

  Joscelin of Edessa, who had died not long after King Baldwin, had been made regent of Antioch in the name of Alys’ daughter Constance. The child, who was by all accounts as headstrong and haughty as her mother, was still so young as to be a simple counter in the game of princes. Alys insisted that a mother was best entitled to serve as regent for a minor heir. For ally she called on, of all people, Joscelin’s son, named likewise Joscelin.

  The father had been greatly feared in Edessa, if never greatly loved. The son was neither loved nor feared. He had risen to claim the principate, in full expectation of getting it; but the barons had refused. He was not fit, they declared, to be prince of a warrior state. For as his father lay dying of a terrible wound taken in battle against the infidel, word had come of yet another infidel attack. The elder Joscelin had bidden his son to go to the aid of the beleaguered fortress; and the son had refused. Edessa’s army, he had said, was too small to be of use. Therefore the elder Joscelin had had himself set in a litter and borne in haste to the siege; and he had raised it, and won the battle, and died in the winning of it.

  The younger Joscelin had an ill name in any event as an idler, a layabout, and a lover of luxury. His father had been no perfect saint; but whatever anyone said of Joscelin the elder, no one had doubted that he could both rule a realm and do battle to defend it. In the considered opinion of the barons of Edessa, the younger Joscelin was fit for neither.

  He of course took issue with them. Edessa was his, he maintained, by right of blood and law. He looked to Alys, likewise deprived of her rightful place and title, and she to him; and when the winter was out, Fulk had a rather pretty war on his hands. It was much the same war that had broken Baldwin, but without the distress of an infidel alliance.

  Fulk was a younger man by far than Baldwin had been, and he had not fought over half his life in the brutal land and climate of Outremer. He could have wished for time to strengthen his position in the kingdom; but such a gift was seldom given a new-crowned king. He gathered his forces and marched out of Jerusalem, riding north toward Antioch.

  Melisende remained behind as she had always done when father or husband went away to war. Always before however she had been left with court and kingdom to manage. This time Fulk took with him what he could and left the rest to chancellors and seneschals. There was nothing for the queen to do, even to be chatelaine of the palace – that office was given to a seneschal.

  Fulk’s meaning was abundantly clear. Melisende’s meek looks and quiet manners had not deceived him. He told her in this that she would continue to be as she pretended; that she was not to claim or to seek power. Her purpose was one and simple: to produce heirs to throne and kingdom.

  And she had been refusing him her bed. Locked doors, doubled guards, and early retirement after banquet or festival had drawn the lines of battle. Fulk, rather than lay siege to her bedchamber, had withdrawn – only to leave her with nothing whatever to do, once he was gone, but sit in her bower and ply her needle and read such books as she found available to her. Most of those, as she discovered, were tractates on the wife’s proper place in Christian marriage.

  Thus began the second dance. Not all of the knights and nobles of the High Court had gone to Antioch with the king. The kingdom must be defended from enemies without as well as within. And there were some who, having left their demesnes in trustworthy hands, saw fit to visit the holy city and, perhaps incidentally, to relieve the queen of her boredom.

  Chief among these was Hugh, Count of Jaffa. Hugh was an old friend of the queen, a companion from her childhood. They had grown up together, played together. Some whispered that their games had not all been innocent – though Richildis doubted that that was more than spite.

  Now Hugh was a man grown, as Melisende was a woman. He had married a great heiress and widow whose sons were nigh as old as he; she doted on him by all accounts, but her sons loathed their stepfather. He was the kind of man whom women loved on sight but men too easily despised: handsome almost to prettiness, with his fair curls and his ready smile, tall and straight and slender, graceful as he bowed over a lady’s hand.

  With him as with Melisende, there was more than met the eye. His smile and his easy chatter concealed a shrewd enough mind, if little inclined to exert itself. Why should it? He had only to look charming, to be given whatever he wanted. He was rather dreadfully spoiled, and rather appealingly aware of it.

  Hugh was in Jerusalem that summer while Melisende cooled her heels and Fulk waged war in Antioch. His countess had matters well in hand in Jaffa. He could linger, dally, keep the queen occupied. She unburdened herself to him – more than she ought, perhaps, but she had known him so long; she did not see that there was any need for propriety, no more than between brother and sister.

  They looked well together, two tall fair handsome people, with the gleam on them that comes only with youth and wealth and pleasure in each other’s company. Her anger at Fulk transmuted there, became something both gentler and more dangerous.

  Richildis was no great master of intrigue, nor had she ever had much to do with the sins of princes. Yet even she could see what was happening. It was evident in a glance, in the touch of a hand. Perhaps they had not thought of such a thing before. Melisende had been a maiden when she married, with a maiden’s innocence; and then she had been with child. Now she was neither.

  As little as her husband pleased her, still he had shown her what it was that a man did with a woman. He had roused the flesh; and it was calling to this other, this youth who also had been mated with wise and practical age.

  A brother could hold a sister’s hand while they conversed, and it was simple courtesy that they should kiss at meeting or at parting. But for touch or kiss to linger… that was not brotherly, nor sisterly either. And there was much lingering that summer; many silences that might conceivably be guilt.

  Melisende would not hear anyone who begged her to be more circumspect. “This is my friend,” she said. “I will not cast him off for a mere and pernicious rumor.”

  No one quite dared to ask the question that was in every mind. Was it a rumor? Or was it truth?

  Richildis did not know which it was. Some days she thought it must be false. Others, when she had seen the two of them riding side by side or sitting together in the solar, hand clasped in hand, fair head beside fair head, deep in intimate converse – she wondered not whether but how they managed it. He could hardly creep in at night; Richildis slept outside the queen’s bedchamber, and she would have known. But during the days – who knew? They were not always in sight of every one of their attendants. On hunts in particular, they could escape in the confusion, meet and do as they pleased, and return with no one the wiser.

  She rebuked herself for thinking such things of a Christian queen. Melisende was devout indeed – but she was a queen, and she was in too many ways as free of her thoughts as a man. Richildis had heard her declare with a strong sense of injury: “Yes, and a man can sire bastards as he pleases, and Mother Church forgives him. Let a woman look once at a man not her husband, and the whole world calls her a harlot. Is that just, I ask you? Is that fair at all?”

  A man sired bastards. A woman conceived and bore them. Richildis saw nothing fair in that, and yet it was the way of the world. God had willed it so.

&nbs
p; But Melisende would not listen to any such wisdom. She was headstrong always, but that summer she seemed possessed by a demon of perversity. Like a child whose father is overstrict, or a woman whose husband leaves her nothing to do in his absence but feed on her impatience, she devoted herself to defying him. What greater defiance could there be than cuckolding him, if only in rumor?

  As the days crawled on and the heat mounted, they grew ever less discreet. A kiss on the cheek became a kiss on the lips. Simple companionship, riding side by side or sitting together at table, darkened and deepened into the queen riding pillion behind her knight, as she called him; or leaning against him as they sat together; or even sitting in his lap.

  In fairness to Count Hugh, he was shyer than she, and less inclined to flaunt the passion that clearly possessed him. She was not besotted, Richildis did not think; simply angry at her husband, sulky and rebellious, and minded to punish him for his treatment of her. But Hugh was desperately, hopelessly, irretrievably in love.

  It betrayed itself in everything he did. When they were apart he yearned for her. When they were together he could not hold himself aloof. His eyes never left her; he even seemed to breathe as she breathed, each breath drawn together and drawn alike.

  Richildis pitied him. But what could she do? Melisende’s mind and ears were locked shut. Hugh was no more amenable to reason. When certain of the bolder courtiers ventured, gently, to remonstrate, he either laughed them off or bade them be silent. One he even threatened with his sword.

  * * *

  And there she was, one day when the sky was hammered brass, dawdling in front of the house that he kept in the city, trying to tell herself that he would listen to her – a mere woman, and one of the queen’s women at that. Still she could not refuse to do it. Word had come that matters in Antioch were settled, more or less. Alys was returned to her exile. Her allies were quelled or at least persuaded to withdraw. Fulk was calling it a victory.

  And he was coming home. Melisende, on hearing that, had dismissed her women and retreated to what some might perceive as a monstrous fit of the sulks. Richildis was more inclined to think that the queen was brooding on her wrongs and plotting revenge.

  In any event she had shut out even the most trusted of her ladies, had locked herself alone in her chambers and refused to come out. Richildis had judged it useful then to come this far, to consider whether she might persuade Hugh to return to Jaffa before the king arrived in Jerusalem. Rumor was running at fever pitch. Not an hour ago she had heard a pair of courtiers giggling over an assignation that she knew had never happened: she had been with her lady at the time, safely and respectably established in the palace chapel, listening to the chaplain discourse with painful dullness on the doctrine of transubstantiation.

  Why she thought she could or even should prevail on the noble Count of Jaffa when he barely knew her face, let alone her name, she did not precisely know. But she was in her way as desperate as Melisende, and – yes, nigh as bored. Her dreams of late were full of dark eyes and a white smile, and a soft rich voice with a Byzantine accent.

  Richildis gathered her courage and approached the gate. The porter was an affable fellow, rather disconcertingly incurious as to why a woman should come to call on his lord with a lone veiled maid and a single borrowed guardsman, and he a Turk at that, none other than Helena’s Kutub. She could not help but wonder how many women had done the same – and how virtuous any of them could have been.

  In any event she was let in without a murmur, shown to a chamber and left there. There was wine on a table, and a bowl of sweets. She ignored both. No one had said anything to her of fetching the count – but neither had anyone declared that he was absent. She began to wonder if they had been expecting someone else, some other woman on a less hallowed errand. If that one did come, would they turn her away?

  From what she had seen of it in courtyard and passage and chamber, this was a gracious house, well appointed, but rather carelessly kept up. The wine was decent, the sweets flyblown. The carpets were fine but thick with dust, and there were cobwebs in the corners. The pick of the servants, she suspected, were in Jaffa with Hugh’s lady wife. Those whom he had here were easier in their manners, unconcerned with a little dust and a spider or two.

  It occurred to her as she sat watching flies devour the sweets, that Bertrand’s near-monastic retreat in Beausoleil could have been as frowsty as this. And yet like a monastery it had been scrupulously clean, meticulously ordered, looked after with both care and devotion. In this house no one seemed to care.

  Yasmin the maid was sitting by the door, giggling over something with Kutub. Both of Richildis’ infidels got on very well with Helena’s Turks – too well, she sometimes thought. She suspected that one or both of them was doing more than giggle in doorways with one or more of the Turks; but when she had called her maids to account, they had assured her solemnly, “Oh, lady, we would never sell our virginity so cheap. Those are slaves. We’re saving ourselves for an emir at least.”

  Possessed of an impulse that she lacked will to resist, she slipped past the maid and the guardsman into the passage that led to this room. It did not end here: it went on into a pallid light that might be the light of sun in a courtyard or an open space, shining obliquely through a window.

  Investigation yielded a window indeed, heavily latticed, and a meeting of passages. One, from the angle of light, led somewhere that was under the sky. The other ascended a stair. Although the window illumined it well enough, lamps burned in niches all the way up. They must have been lit some time ago: they burned low and smoky, and one flickered, close to going out.

  She followed the line of the lamps, not thinking of what she was doing, simply doing it. The lamps led her to another story, a corridor of closed doors, another stair. That one ended in a door that hung slightly ajar, with light streaming through. She opened it a little more, slipped round it, stood dazzled and streaming-eyed in full sunlight.

  Slowly the painful brightness eased. She blinked away tears. She stood, as she had suspected, on the roof of the house. A high parapet rimmed it, and a garden grew in a corner of it, trees in pots, flowers, a bank of crimson roses. The neglect that vexed the rest of the house did not make itself known here. Someone loved this garden and tended it, trained the roses over the parapet and up into a sort of bower, trimmed away the dead blooms and cherished the living ones, and made them beautiful in this unexpected place.

  Under the bower of roses, on a soft green bed that was, perhaps, a cloak, two bodies lay twined. There was no mistaking that fall of wheat-fair hair, all loosed as it was, streaming over white shoulders.

  Neither of them was naked, or particularly immodest. He was fully clothed. Her gown had slipped low, and her shift with it, baring her shoulders, but the rest of her was covered well enough. Their embrace, so passionate at first glance, on closer scrutiny seemed almost chaste.

  Melisende lay with her head back, eyes closed, face perfectly and utterly blank. She might have been asleep or in a trance, or somewhere very far away.

  Richildis made herself a shadow, a breath, a whisper of wind. They seemed oblivious – but one never knew.

  After a while Hugh raised his head from where it had lain on Melisende’s breast. “Oh, lady,” he said. “Lady, I love you with all my heart.”

  Melisende’s eyes did not open. No part of her moved, except her lips as she responded. “Yes,” she said. Only that. And no more expression in it than in her face.

  He rose over her, looking down on her. “It’s not the same for you, is it? Men love you. You love none of them.”

  “I am fond of you,” she said. “I like you much better than the king.”

  “Why? Because I’m prettier?”

  She slid from beneath him. He lay on his side and stared at her. Next, thought Richildis, he would beg her to forget what he had said. But she spoke first, without perceptible anger. “You are prettier. And you talk to me as if I were something more than a child.”

&nbs
p; “He is,” said Hugh, “a very good lover. They say.”

  Nothing else that he had said had sparked her temper. This did. She bridled. “Who says? Who would know such a thing?”

  Perhaps he flushed. It was difficult to tell. “People. Courtiers. He knows how to please a woman. He can please her very greatly.”

  “What is pleasing about getting children?”

  He was not astonished to hear that. Richildis, who was – not that Melisende had said it but that she had said it to this man who by all appearances was her lover – began to understand a little.

  “Lady,” he said, “you will never let me show you. These kisses – these… other things – they are only prelude. If you would only let—”

  “I do not want another child,” she said with iron will. “None of you men can comprehend that. You are not forced to endure both the inconvenience and the pain.”

  “Do you say this to torment me?” he demanded.

  “I say this because it is true. I like you very much. I reckon you my friend. You warm me as he never could.”

  “And yet he loves you, too,” said Hugh, “and you love neither of us.”

  “I like you,” she said. “I don’t like him. I never shall.”

  “Liking is not enough,” Hugh said, “to be worth what everyone is saying of us.”

  She looked levelly into his face. “Are you ashamed? Afraid? Then go. Take yourself off to your doting countess. I’ll be no worse off than I was before.”

  “You would be bored to insanity,” he said.

  “I will find somewhat to do.”

  “What? Foment a rebellion? Seize the throne?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t,” said Hugh. And when she did not reply: “You wouldn’t.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I dream of it. It wasn’t a husband my father wanted for me, you know. It was a keeper. A man to chain and kennel me, to prevent me from declaring the truth: that I am as fit to rule as any man.”