Jeannette finally let herself speak aloud. “I hope milord knight will forgive me my impertinence last night up in the courtyard of Koenigsbourg.”
Willem, looking awkward, said, “I deserved it. In fact I’m grateful for it.”
She smiled tentatively. “Thank you, milord.” Then in a rush of gleeful informality, she leaned into Willem and said confidingly, “You should have seen her the night before the tourney, she was in such a state.”
“I was not,” Jouglet said.
“Oh, she was, milord,” the whore assured him.
“That’s enough, Jeannette,” Jouglet said pointedly, but Jeannette cheerfully ignored this.
“You’re the first man she’s ever revealed herself to, milord, did you know that? Usually she just disguises herself as one of us for some thigh-jousting when she requires relief. You must be very special for her to risk revealing herself to someone who knows her as— “
“Our hostess would like some money,” Jouglet informed Willem, who was self-consciously trying to look busy in the constricted space without actually undressing in front of the prostitute. He did this mostly by laying down his sword and then picking it up again, as if he’d just noticed it. Jeannette looked pleased that her business had been made clear. “That’s what this is about. Although I’m not sure,” Jouglet added, glaring at her friend, “if the strategy is to flatter you into a generous mood, or to simply make me desperate to shut her up.”
“Why not both?” Jeannette laughed. Jouglet flicked her teeth at her in mock exasperation, then unknotted her overknotted belt-pouch and handed out some silver pennies. Jeannette asked hopefully, “And will you be using our services often then, milords?”
“No,” said Jouglet firmly. “The new darling of the court can’t be seen going to the whores regularly, that’s as bad as attaching himself to a flagrant sodomite like myself. We are only here now to please Konrad.” She met Jeannette’s gaze then looked meaningfully at the low, curtained doorway.
“Ah, so she’s cultivating you,” Jeannette said, ignoring Jouglet’s glance. “She’s good at that, you know— Marcus the seneschal will be given freeman status, and have a duchy and a royal wife soon thanks to Jouglet.”
“That’s just a rumor,” Jouglet said impatiently. “For God’s sake, Willem, give her some money, would you? Or she’ll never leave.”
* * *
When they were alone in the slanted shadows— the whores’ giggles clearly audible two paces away beyond the grey curtain— Willem and Jouglet, kneeling side by side on the thin canvas mat, each held out a hand to the other. She reached up to untie his mantle.
He stopped her.
“Please don’t tell me you want to recite love songs to me first,” Jouglet said.
“This seems a sordid and shameful way to carry on.”
“Well it’s certainly not as dignified as jumping me in the wine cellar,” she conceded. “Do you have a better idea?” She shrugged his hand away and finished untying his mantle, pushing it off his shoulders with one hand as with the other she reached under her chin to untie her own.
Willem reached out quickly and stopped her hand again. “What is this we are doing?” he asked quietly. “Who are you to me? What is Jouglet to Willem?”
She swatted his hand away. “That is a pointless conversation. I’m your friend, of course. And your secret sponsor until you can steer yourself aright through the dangerous straits of court policy. If you like, I’ll be your lover. But I cannot be your lady, Willem, and you do require a lady, so I’ll find you one.”
“I don’t need a lady now,” he said softly. “There is a minstrel who already has a huge measure of my esteem— “
“A lady is more susceptible to poetry, and better for your future,” Jouglet said firmly, untying her mantle.
“This…if this…” He gestured awkwardly between them. “If this is going to be, I cannot seek someone else to be devoted to.”
“That could just be for show, Willem, but it’s a show you must perform to protect both our reputations.”
He shook his head. “Then we can’t do this. I would be making a harlot of you.”
“Nobody will know.” Jouglet laughed impatiently, pulling off the mantle and glancing toward the curtain.
“I’ll know,” Willem said. “God will know.”
She smiled with exasperation. “Very well, then. How might we proceed intelligently without offending your chivalrous and pious sensibilities?”
“Your sarcasm is not helpful,” Willem said with irritation. “I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon— “
“I thought as much— that noble brow has those little rows of horizontal furrows in it that it tends toward when you are trying very hard to be a good knight.”
Still serious, Willem took her hands. “Be my lady. Secretly,” he added quickly, seeing her about to burst into dismissive laughter. “The beloved’s name ought to be kept secret anyhow. Nobody will ever know but the two of us. This is…let me earn this from you. If I don’t do that somehow, this will be nothing but my baser nature taking advantage of the situation. I want to prove myself, or it will seem to come too cheaply.”
“This does not come cheaply,” Jouglet countered sharply. “For either of us.” She took her hands out of his and looked at him almost as seriously as he was looking at her. “Willem’s secret lady is a role that I can’t play. It would be even more ludicrous than merely being your secret lover, you know that. And forgive me for distrusting your chivalrous behavior, but you want me to play the role mostly so that you can play a role, too— and it’s a worthy role, but I’m one of the only people with whom you don’t need to play it, and I like that.” She began to unlace her left boot. “We really don’t have much time, let’s not waste it.”
Again Willem reached out to stop her from undressing, very firmly placing her hand back upon her own lap. “We are going no further until we have an understanding of what I would be doing to you.”
Jouglet looked almost cross. “Konrad will not linger in a muddy canvas tent. We only have a few moments alone in here, Willem, how do you want to spend them?”
He considered her in the dim light, his eyes quickly, involuntarily, flickering over the whole of her body before returning to her face. “I want to undress you, of course,” he said, with disarming sheepishness.
She was taken by surprise, and laughed a little. She kissed him, and smiled when he grabbed her by both arms. His hands worked their way across her still-clothed body and began to feel for the breasts his cheek has rested on earlier.
“They’re still there,” she assured him, and they were.
It felt thrillingly bizarre to each of them for Willem to take the lead. For Jouglet there was also an unfamiliar relief, that for once she allowed herself the forbidden luxury of being acted upon, instead of acting. She helped him only passively, raising an arm or a knee to add grace to his fumbling, hurried disrobing of her, but otherwise she literally put herself entirely into his hands.
When he had peeled everything away he stretched her nude body down across the mat, running his hand up the middle of her torso, trying to spread his fingers to touch both nipples at once. “This is your body,” he murmured. He cupped a hand around one small breast in the shadows. “This”— the other hand went to one hip— “and this”— the first hand moved along the delicate curve of her rib cage, and her waist— “and all this, has been here all the time— “
“We don’t have time for that,” Jouglet whispered, smiling at the warmth of his touch. She reached up to pull at the gold pin of his tunic. “Join me.”
He blushed. “I’m shy to undress before you.”
She laughed. “But I’ve already seen you naked.”
“I know. It’s absurd.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” she offered and did so.
He kissed her eyelids. “No, I’m man enough to handle this.”
“Then so am I,” she grinned, eyes opening again.
S
tooping under the sloped ceiling, he unceremoniously disrobed. Then he knelt on the understuffed mat and shifted one large leg to straddle her.
Jouglet saw the look that flitted across his face, and she raised a hand to touch his bare chest lightly. “Yes, Willem,” she said softly, answering the unasked question. “I’ve done this more than you have, and with more partners. But,” she promised, whispering, “you are by far the most cherished man who has ever found himself where you are now.”
Willem smiled and kissed her forehead, then carefully lowered his weight onto her. His eyes were close to Jouglet’s cool, familiar face as his body felt the outlines of the warm and unknown woman underneath him. When her legs parted as he pressed down between them, when he pushed into her and felt her clench around him in response, Jouglet’s face and voice responded too, timed so exactly to his actions there was no way to ignore that he was possessing, entering, taking his best friend. Nothing had ever felt so complicated. It was enthralling.
11
Rhetoric
[the art of ethical persuasion]
15 July
Marcus reached Oricourt Castle in Burgundy in the middle of a morning, at the end of he did not know how many days. Memory, instinct, and his good sense of direction had brought him through unfamiliar Vosges mountain passes. The air was clean and fresh after the rainstorm he had ridden through, but he himself was not.
He’d been received here formally before; they knew him at the outer gate. They also knew why he had come, and the porter’s boys avoided making eye contact with him. It was obvious from this that the messenger had been here, that the axe had already fallen.
He hardly noticed what happened next. He was in the outer courtyard, the odor of livestock oddly comforting after days of unfamiliar marsh and mountain scents. He was by the stables. He was breathing even harder than his horse, and the bay, almost white with sweaty foam, was about to collapse. The stableboy, on the alert, had already run inside; by the time Marcus was dismounting, Alphonse’s stout wife, Monique, Countess of Burgundy, was standing at the opening to the inner courtyard, under the great arching stone gate-lintel, bracing herself for a confrontation. Even in his anguish and exhaustion, he appreciated the genuine decency of the woman— meeting him alone, not flanked by threatening retainers.
Marcus stumbled when he landed on the ground, because the bad leg was still numb. That stupid injury. He walked stiff legged, like an old man with arthritis— for three steps, and then his body crumpled underneath him into the sandy mud and he heard, as if from a great distance, his own voice moan with pain.
The next thing he saw clearly was the enormous, elongated under-jaw of a hunting hound, its damp nose anxiously sniffling at his hair. A female voice called the dog to heel; in its absence, a woman’s face bent over him, frowning, but now he was inside. On a cold floor, near a warm hearth. On musty rushes. His sword was gone. He tried to remember where he was, and why the face was so familiar. That was Monique— the daughter of the family in whose home he had been raised. He had been fond of her. Why was she here?
He saw behind her a whitewashed wall with a banner hanging on it, visible from the light of a small, parchment-covered window: gold with angled double bars of red across it. Where did he know that from?
The Burgundian coat of arms.
Oh, God.
“Your sword is with the porter,” Monique said reassuringly, in greeting. “It will be returned on your departure.”
He sat up, using his elbows to keep his balance on the floor. Monique took a few steps away from the fire to give him space, and with a gesture commanded the dog to do likewise. “Good milady, I have come to seek audience with your daughter,” he said, as polite and formal as he could make it sound, willing her not to notice his filthy clothes, dirty face, and wanton-looking hair.
The plump aristocratic woman shook her head. “You cannot see her, Marcus. She is dictating a letter that you had best go back to Koenigsbourg to receive.”
He dragged himself to his knees, slid toward her on the rushes and then prostrated himself right at her feet, clinging to her low leather boots. The hound moved closer with a delicate growl. “Please. Please, Monique, for the love of God, please let me see her.”
“You are making a spectacle of yourself, Marcus,” she said softly. “I do not think you would venture such behavior with anyone else, and you should not venture it with me.”
He rolled over on the rushes and stared miserably at the low arched ceiling. “Please let me see her. You can stay in the room. I’m not asking to be let into her chamber, let her come out here.”
“She is not in a mood to be seen,” Monique informed him, gently.
He indulged in a short, exhausted, bitter laugh. “She will want to see me.”
“Marcus, I know you took a genuine affection for each other— I hadn’t realized how genuine until her reaction to the message from her father— but it will only exacerbate the pain for both of you.”
“Did he say why he’s done it? Has he named the new intended husband?” Marcus demanded, resisting the urge to spit. She lowered her eyes and tried to seem nonchalant, which gave Marcus his answer. “What if Imogen refuses? Good God, does Willem even know your husband’s intentions? Is Willem the least bit interested in marrying her?”
“The issue is not whom she will marry but whom she won’t,” Monique said uncomfortably. “She will not marry you.”
In that moment, Marcus— who did not like deception and was almost never good at it— knew exactly what he would have to do. With masonic precision every step of the plan lay open in his mind. A thrill, a surge went through him: it would not be a pleasant process, or an honorable one, but at the end of it, he would have his lover as his wife.
Affecting resignation, he sat up and tried, uselessly, to comb his fingers through matted hair. He rubbed his sleeve against his face, but the sleeve was so filthy that he only put himself into worse appearance.
“I must be a mess,” he said in a husky voice, barely above a whisper. “Please forgive me, milady, for appearing in your home so out of sorts.” In obvious pain, he pulled himself up to his knees and then with further wincing got to his feet. He bowed politely, then stood at attention near the hearth, with his head slightly lowered, as if awaiting her instructions. This was the public stance he adopted with Konrad— it was a gesture of how entirely he seemed to place himself at her disposal. “How kind of you to receive me on my journey south as the emperor’s ambassador,” he added, giving both of them an excuse for this encounter.
Monique looked at him, troubled, for a long silent moment, then she sighed and adopted a suddenly formal air. “As loyal subjects my daughter and I would of course be delighted to receive our emperor’s ambassador.”
His heart leapt. “Do you mean you will— “
“It is not the custom to allow gentlemen into my daughter’s room, but perhaps our minstrel can entertain you with a song while I fetch my daughter out.” At his look of crazed hope she lowered her voice to add, “You will accomplish nothing by it, Marcus.”
He at once bent in half with a second bow, but she gestured him, rather sharply, to rise. “A supplicant for my daughter’s hand might bow so. The emperor’s proxy does not.”
The minstrel played Bertran de Born songs for what seemed like months while Monique was away. Bertran de Born— the troubadour-knight who’d turned young Henry of England against his king and father. It seemed painfully appropriate. Perhaps it was due to his agitated state, but Marcus found the music graceless and flat, and the singer’s voice was entirely dull compared to Jouglet’s husky tenor. For a fourth time Marcus pushed away the attentive hound and suddenly wished he’d stayed at court and employed Jouglet to aid in this— Jouglet was a skilled manipulator, and Marcus was not; Jouglet had caused these problems, but without knowing of the dire consequences, and would surely amend the scheme if apprised of the whole situation.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Jouglet’s schemes were often too subtl
e for Marcus to track; it might be in the minstrel’s interest for the heir of Burgundy to be married to the first Imperial Knight— although why, Marcus could not guess.
He glanced around the hall, surprised by how repressive and damp it felt, even compared to the harsh environment of Koenigsbourg. The room was hardly large enough for entertaining— not that Alphonse was likely to have many guests on this isolated hilltop, far from even his few devoted vassals. It was a new building, built within Marcus’s lifetime, but it was dowdy and dark; no wonder the count was willing to endure the endless small humiliations Konrad foisted on him for the pleasure of staying anywhere but here. He had always pitied Monique for her marriage; now he pitied her entire situation.
The countess finally reappeared from the door to the yard. Behind her was Imogen, dressed in white. Marcus had a brief, glorious, insane fantasy of grabbing her and fleeing with her across the countryside.
Instead he stood at polite attention as the two drew near the fire. Imogen’s face was livid from sobbing. He wondered when the message had been delivered, by how many hours he had failed to intercept it. Their eyes met. She looked besotted with affection for him, even now. He was enraged to think of another man ever seeing such regard on her face. Of another man feeling her warm hands undressing him. Of another man feeling the cool smooth skin of her buttocks pressing up against him. A man who did not know her and was worth less than Marcus himself, a man who did not deserve her. And would reject her, perhaps denounce her, once he knew the truth. He saw her entire body start slightly, realized she was barely checking the urge to throw herself into his arms. “Milady,” he said hoarsely with a polite bow to Monique. His voice was trembling. He was trembling. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Milady, may I have dispensation to embrace your daughter? It is a gesture of regard from Emperor Konrad.”
Monique looked at the ground, hesitated, sighed, then said, “Very well. As long as it does not surpass what the emperor himself would deem seemly.”
He did not tell her the emperor’s idea of seemliness would practically allow him to mount Imogen naked on the rushes. He held his arms out slightly and took half a step toward her; she ran to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, dissolving at once into such pathetic weeping that he could barely keep his own sobs in check. “Dearest,” he whispered. “I can remedy this.”
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