The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1

by Andrea Japp

  ‘You have a hearty appetite. It is a pleasure to receive you in my home.’

  ‘Believe me, the pleasure is all mine.’

  She detected an amused sparkle in his eye.

  All at once, the Comte’s smile faded, and he instinctively raised his hand to tell her to be quiet. He strained his ear in the direction of the postern door.

  Agnès swallowed hard. Clément.

  Artus d’Authon rose to his feet and crept cat-like over to the door. What should she do? Feign a sudden attack of coughing? Warn the child by crying out: ‘What is it, Monsieur!’ in a loud voice? No. The Comte would see through the ruse and the evening had been going too well to risk ruining everything now.

  He pulled hard on the door, and Clément toppled into the room like a sack of potatoes. He hauled him up sharply by the ear.

  ‘What are you doing here? Were you spying on us?’

  ‘No, Monsieur. No, no …’

  Clément shot Agnès an alarmed look. Artus would be within his rights to flog the hide off him if he saw fit. He was trapped. The Dame de Souarcy thought quickly.

  ‘Come over here, Clément, my dear.’

  ‘Is he one of your servants?’

  ‘The very best. He is my protector. He was keeping a watch on you to make sure his lady was in no danger.’

  ‘He is a little on the small side to offer much protection.’

  ‘Indeed, but he is brave.’

  ‘And what would you have done, my boy, had my wicked intention been to pounce on your lady?’

  Clément pulled out the carving knife he carried on him at all times, and declared in a solemn voice:

  ‘Why, I would have killed you, Monsieur.’

  The Comte burst out laughing and, amidst gasps of merriment, declared:

  ‘Do you know, young man, I believe you capable of it! Now off to bed with you; nothing untoward will happen to your mistress, upon my honour.’

  Clément stared at Agnès, who nodded in agreement. He vanished as if by magic.

  ‘You stir passionate loyalties, Madame.’

  ‘He is still a child.’

  ‘A child who would have stabbed me to death if necessary, I am sure of it.’

  A bewildering thought flashed through his mind. This woman was worth risking life and limb to protect.

  Just then Mabile entered the room, her eyes bright with curiosity.

  ‘A thousand pardons. I thought you might be in need of assistance, Madame.’

  ‘No. We are waiting for the third course,’ Agnès replied curtly. The girl bowed her head, slowly enough for the Dame de Souarcy to be able to glimpse the spite in her eyes.

  The dessert of fruit and nut rissoles soon appeared. Mabile’s face wore a more friendly expression. Even so, Agnès would have to put a stop to this girl and the façade they had been keeping up for months, and the thought worried her. Up until then, she had been able to manipulate Eudes by pretending she admired and trusted him. The incident with the pigeon had undermined this strategy, which, however dishonest, had succeeded over the years. The secret battle between her and her half-brother was about to burst out into the open and she was unprepared. She would be defeated. She had acted rashly and foolishly by demanding the carrier pigeon be returned to her. Restraining herself would have enabled her to keep up the pretence of not knowing Eudes’s true intentions a little longer. Comte Artus’s miraculous arrival and the obvious pleasure he had derived from their evening together only increased her anger with herself. With a little more time she might have gained in him an important ally. Her reckless anger towards the girl had spoiled everything. Agnès silenced her anxieties.

  The last course was a thick cherry cream with wine, served on crêpes.

  ‘You have treated me to a veritable banquet, Madame.’

  ‘A modest one for a nobleman of your standing.’

  He was surprised by this formal courtesy coming from her lips, but understood when he looked up and saw the servant now waiting on them. It was no longer the sullen, miserable-looking woman from before but a rather ungainly, stocky young girl.

  ‘Adeline, you will prepare the master bedroom in the South Wing for Seigneur d’Authon.’

  The young girl mumbled her consent and curtseyed clumsily before scurrying from the room.

  ‘She is not very bright, but she is trustworthy,’ Agnès explained.

  ‘Unlike Mabile, do you mean?’

  Agnès responded with a vague smile.

  ‘I regret having put you to so much trouble. I fear I have outstayed my welcome. I shall leave at dawn. Pray, grant me the favour of not troubling yourself to attend my departure. One of your farm hands can saddle my horse.’

  ‘And I am obliged to you for the rare and all too brief entertainment your visit has brought me. The evenings here at Souarcy are long, and your presence has lifted the customary dullness that descends upon them.’

  He stared at her, hoping that her glib speech was more than just a mark of exquisite politeness.

  *

  Less than an hour later, he was settled in what had been Hugues de Souarcy’s chamber, which Adeline had gone to great pains to prepare – even starting a fire in the grate although the evening was mild. He walked over to the metal sconces in order to blow out the candles. Their sheer number attested to their having been lit in his honour. No small luxury for such a modest household, for even if her hives produced wax, Agnès probably sold it instead of using it. After removing his surcoat, he stretched out on the bed without taking the trouble to undress or even to take off his shoes, and lay with his eyes open, staring into the darkness.

  Artus acknowledged his confusion. What had started as mere curiosity on his part had turned into something quite unexpected. He had even forgotten about the gruesome murders.

  Clearly the lady pleased him greatly, and this type of attraction had become rare enough in his life for it to unsettle and surprise him. Was his life really so empty that the Dame de Souarcy could fill it this easily? His life, it was true, had become a wilderness. In reality, it had always been one – a wilderness full of obligations and interests, which helped him to forget the painfully slow passing of time. And now eight hours had just gone by in a flash. Over the course of a single evening, time had regained its urgency. This lady had cured Artus’s boredom and, what was more, his expectation of boredom. Her victory had been a swift one and yet she suspected nothing.

  He was mistaken. Agnès was fully aware of the gains she had made during the course of their dinner. And, although she felt triumphant, she was clear-sighted enough to realise that she had won only a simple battle and that the real war was yet to come.

  After leaving instructions for the Comte to be woken, she went back up to her chamber, pretending not to notice Mabile’s absence from the kitchens. Perhaps the evil creature had run to seek refuge with her former master? Nonsense! Not in the night and on foot.

  The glow of an oil lamp made her pause at the top of the stone steps.

  A voice whispered:

  ‘Madame …’

  ‘Are you not asleep yet, Clément?’

  ‘I was waiting for you.’

  He went ahead of her into her room, which was sparsely lit by a few tallow lamps. The resin torches, which blackened the walls, were reserved for the long bare stone passageways or for the cavernous halls.

  ‘Has something bad happened?’ Agnès asked, after pushing the heavy door closed.

  ‘You could say that. Somebody removed the pigeon and the message from your chamber this evening.’

  ‘But you took it up to your attic with you,’ objected the lady.

  ‘Only while I copied out the message. Afterwards I rolled the strip of paper carefully round the bird’s leg and replaced him in your quarters, on the dressing table.’

  ‘You knew she would take it, didn’t you? So that is where she went between courses.’

  ‘I could have sworn it,’ the boy retorted. ‘Madame, we are not ready to confront the Baron head o
n. Mabile cannot be certain you saw the message or, even worse, that you suspect it comes from her. It suits her purposes not to know, to turn a blind eye. Otherwise she would be obliged to tell her master that their plan has failed, and he would not thank her for it. We need to gain more time in order to prepare for this fight, especially now after the Comte’s unexpected visit.’

  Agnès closed her eyes in relief, and bent down to embrace the child.

  ‘What would I do if it weren’t for you?’

  ‘Were it not for you I would be dead, Madame; were it not for you I would die.’

  ‘Then let us both do our utmost to stay alive, dear Clément.’ She planted a kiss on the boy’s forehead and watched him leave the room noiselessly, her eyes moist with tears.

  She stood still for a few moments, struggling against the memory of years of sadness and privation, of loneliness and fear. She fought off, inch by inch, the stubborn desire to surrender, to abandon herself.

  A sudden voice, a voice she knew as if it were her own, floated into her consciousness. A sweet, gentle, but firm voice whose words she had treasured, the voice of her good angel, the Baroness Clémence de Larnay. How could she have almost forgotten her own mother when Madame Clémence’s every gesture, smile, frown or caress was imprinted on her body and soul? God only knew how much she had loved that woman, so much that there were times when she thought of her as her only mother because they had chosen each other. God only knew how bereft she had felt when the woman died.

  Her eyes brimmed with burning tears and she heard herself murmur:

  ‘Madame, I miss you so very much.’

  Agnès let herself be engulfed by all the years of lessons, laughter, secrets and affection they had shared. Madame Clémence had insisted the little girl choose a constellation for them. Agnès had taken a long time deciding between Virgo, Orion, the Plough and countless others, plumping finally for Cygnus, which shone so bright in early September. It was Madame Clémence who had read and re-read the ballads of Madame Marie de France to her. How they had both relished the poem Lanval, about a brave knight to whom a fairy promised her love on condition that he kept it secret. The Baroness had taught her how to play chess, roguishly warning her: ‘I confess to cheating. However, for love of you I shall try to play fairly for the first few games.’

  Had Madame Clémence been happy? Perhaps, during the first few years of her marriage, though Agnès could not know for sure. In fact, it was their mutual loneliness that had first brought them together. The loneliness of a beautiful lady declining in years, whose husband and son appeared to treat her like a piece of furniture, addressing her with frosty politeness, and of a little girl terrified by the thought of being abandoned after her mother’s death, tormented by Eudes, who had dinned it into her that she would do well to obey him if she did not want to find herself out on the street. Deep down, Agnès realised that she had always been afraid, except when Madame Clémence’s presence had given her the courage to keep going, to face her fears.

  She recalled a long-forgotten scene. What had happened exactly? No doubt Baron Robert had returned to Larnay after one of his amorous encounters, the worse for drink and reeking of the female sex. He had charged into his wife’s chamber without taking the trouble to knock, intent on gratifying one last urge. Agnès was sitting at Madame Clémence’s feet being read a story. At her husband’s rude drunken entrance the Baroness stood up. He muttered a few words that caused Madame Clémence’s face to turn pale, but which the little girl did not understand.

  Agnès could still hear the cold, sharp voice ringing in her ears:

  ‘Leave here this instant, Monsieur!’

  The Baron had staggered over to his wife, his hand raised as though to slap her. Instead of backing away or crying out she had moved towards him and, seizing him by his coat collar, had growled:

  ‘You do not scare me, Monsieur! Do not forget who I am or where I come from! Who do you think you are, you pig? Go and mount your whores if it pleases you and leave us in peace. I do not wish to see your face until you are sober and penitent. I command you to leave here at once, you uncouth drunkard!’

  Agnès remembered seeing the Baron visibly recoil, his shoulders hunched, his drunken red face turning a greyish-green. He had opened his mouth, but no sound had come. The Baroness stared at him, unflinching, standing her ground.

  He had done as she asked, or more precisely, as she commanded, muttering feebly for a man of his pride: ‘You’ve gone too far!’

  As soon as the door to her quarters had closed, Madame Clémence had been seized by a fit of trembling. She had explained to the alarmed and confused Agnès in a voice that was once more gentle:

  ‘The only way to bring a dog to heel is to growl more fiercely than he, to raise your ears and tail and bare your teeth.’

  ‘And then he won’t go for your throat?’

  Madame Clémence had smiled and stroked Agnès’s hair. ‘In most cases he will back down, though sometimes he will attack, and when that happens you must fight.’

  ‘Even if you are afraid he might bite you?’

  ‘Fear will not save you from being bitten, my dear. On the contrary.’

  To fight.

  Up until then, Agnès had always tried to avoid conflict by outwitting her enemy, by using her guile. For years the strategy had seemed to work. Though not entirely, for she now found herself in an even more dangerous position than the one she had been in before her marriage or just after Hugues’s death.

  Guile? That was what she had always told herself. But why not admit it: she had no guile; she was simply afraid. She had comforted herself with the thought that as a woman it was more appropriate, more becoming, to take a defensive position. But vultures such as Eudes made no exceptions for women. On the contrary, women inflamed their thirst for blood because they counted on a woman’s weakness and fear to provide them with a swift and painless victory.

  To fight. There would be no more evasion, no more pretence.

  It was her turn to attack and she would show no more mercy than her enemy.

  The iron mine, Eudes’s mine, which rumour had it was almost exhausted. Her half-brother and his ancestors before him had built the Larnay fortune on it and, more importantly, had received the self-interested benevolence of the monarchs they served. What if King Philip were to learn that the deposit was nearly depleted? Unquestionably the small favours its owner enjoyed would soon dry up, too. Eudes would be alone and defenceless. Artus d’Authon would once more be his all-powerful liege lord, and Artus liked Agnès, she knew. It is easy to observe when emotion takes a sincere man by surprise. No more guile, she had said. But there was nothing wrong with her using her feminine wiles. They were a weapon, one of the few that a woman was still permitted to wield.

  To growl more fiercely, to raise her ears and tail, and bare her teeth. And above all to be ready to leap at her enemy’s throat. To prevail.

  How would she reach the King? The answer was simple: anonymously. The only intermediary the Dame de Souarcy could think of was Monsieur de Nogaret, of whom it was said he watched over the interests of the kingdom as if his own life depended on it.

  She felt a sudden release and let her body slowly slide to the floor. She let out a long and peaceful sigh:

  ‘Thank you, my angel, thank you, Clémence.’

  It was not yet daybreak when Artus climbed back into the saddle the following morning. There was no reason for him to leave so early other than an irrational fear of meeting again, so soon, the woman who had robbed him of his sleep. For he had lain awake the whole of that short night, smiling one minute as he recalled her almost girlish hilarity, troubled the next by his strange infatuation.

  A regular popinjay! He chuckled at the image of himself, a man over forty years of age behaving like a foolish lovesick youth! What a miracle! What a delightful miracle!

  He sat up straight, trying his best to put on a sombre face in keeping with his reputation.

  A few moments later he was rid
ing across country, intoxicated by the powerful supple speed of Ogier, who was refreshed after his night’s rest. A sudden anxious thought sobered him: what if he were making a mistake? What if she were a mere illusion and not the ideal woman he had, until then, never allowed himself to believe in?

  He slowed his horse to a walk, troubled by the notion.

  A hundred yards on he was smiling again as he recalled her account of her first honey harvest that had ended in a farcical failure.

  The riotous flurry of emotions startled him. Zounds! Could he be falling in love? So soon? The attraction was clear, at least as far as he was concerned. However, attraction of the senses was, in everyone’s opinion, commonplace and arbitrary enough for it not to cause him any great concern. But love and love’s pains … In all honesty he could not say he had ever experienced them.

  A sudden fit of laughter threw him onto the pommel of his saddle and against Ogier’s neck. The horse gave a friendly shake of its mane.

  Rue de Bucy, Paris, July 1304

  In the implacable calm of that early evening, the echo of feet on a stone floor. Francesco de Leone strained his ears to hear where the sound was coming from, only to realise all of a sudden that the footsteps were his.

  He was walking along the ambulatory of the church. His sleeveless black coat flapped around his calves, occasionally brushing the rood screen shielding the chancel. A large white crucifix with eight branches fused together in pairs was sewn onto the garment, above his heart.

  How long had he been advancing in this way? For a while no doubt, as his eyes were accustomed to the semi-darkness. He tried by the weak light filtering through the dome to study the shadows that mocked him. They seemed to be flowing between the pillars, lapping at the base of the walls, slipping between the balustrades. What church was this? What did it matter? It was not very big and yet he had been turning in it for so many hours he knew every last one of the massive stones whose ochre hue appeared tinged with pink in the gloom.

  He tried to catch up with the silently moving figure, betrayed only by the faint rustle of fabric, of heavy silk. It was the figure of a woman, a woman hiding. A proud figure, almost as tall as he. Suddenly he noticed the woman’s long hair. So long it reached below her knees, merging in a wave with her silk dress.