Melisende sat back. It might have been relief; it might have been annoyance.
“You were ill? Then why did you let the world think you hung back from cowardice?”
“I was bound to the privy for a day and a night. By the time I came out, it was all decided. Any protests I uttered, any truth I told, would be mocked as lies.”
He was angry, but not so angry that he could not speak clearly. Melisende either did not see it or did not care. “You are weak.”
“My stomach is weak – and my wife’s potions were strong.”
“Do you think that she should have been exiled in your place?”
He met her hard dark stare. “She did not lose her wits and run to Ascalon.”
“So calmly you speak of it,” said Melisende.
“Some devil was in me,” he said. “It drove me in a madness of anger and fear. I had been betrayed – I was reckoned a traitor – then let it be true; let them have cause to judge me as it seemed to please them. I would be what their judgment made me.”
“You did not judge well,” Melisende said.
“That is what the king said,” said Hugh. “He chose to be merciful.”
“The king does as he chooses.”
Hugh looked her in the face. “I ask no mercy from you, not even your blessing. Only let me know that you keep me in your memory.”
“I remember,” Melisende said slowly, “that we were friends once.”
“Then go on remembering it. I will get my honor back – I will remember my courage. And when I come back, I’ll offer it at your feet.”
“I want no offerings,” she said.
“In three years’ time, the heart can change much,” he said. “Will you, my lady? Will you agree to remember me?”
“I can hardly forget you,” said Melisende.
* * *
Bertrand had heard that Hugh of Jaffa was in the city. It was the talk of certain quarters, that a man accused of cowardice and worse should come openly there of all places. Bertrand had evaded most of the gossip, taking refuge in Helena’s house. She only gossiped when it suited her, and tonight she was in no such mood. Her house was a haven of warmth, the dinner she served him as excellent as ever. Of the child he saw nothing, no more than he ever did – it was fostered out, he supposed, or disposed of. He never asked. Helena never mentioned it.
And yet for all the comfort of house and heart’s love, he left them both to venture the city at night. He had wooed her into bed quite some time before, but tonight she was not inclined toward him. She had begun her courses, which for her were always painful. She would have kept him there in spite of them, housed him in the room she reserved for guests, spared him the trouble of traveling back to his own house in the dark. But the rain that had been falling when he came was gone away, a keen wind blown the clouds from the sky, laying bare the frosty stars. In company with his squire and his torchbearer and, at her insistence, three of her Turks, he was well escorted.
It was bitterly cold, but he was warm with spiced wine and Helena’s parting kiss, and his cloak was heavy, of thickly woven wool lined with fur. He rambled a bit, going home. It was still rather early, hours from midnight. People had come out to breathe the clean air after the long grim rain. On the Street of the Furriers he saw a huddle of men in a doorway, dicing as people liked to do here, with torches to light them and a jar of wine for warmth.
Just as Bertrand was approaching, one of them moved. The light caught fair hair, made distinct a turn of the head.
Bertrand paused. Oh, surely not. That could not be Hugh of Jaffa, dicing in a doorway as if he had not a care in the world – he who should be shut up behind thick walls and guarded against the crowd of his enemies.
The man in the doorway looked up, laughing at a jest. Yes, it was Hugh. Bertrand hung on his heel, torn between the cowardice of ducking his head and slipping away or the courage of offering a greeting to the king’s convicted enemy.
As he hesitated, a shadow stirred behind Hugh, sliding into the darkness of the doorway. Instincts honed by years of fighting brought Bertrand to the alert.
He could not move fast enough. A knife flashed in the torchlight, stabbing viciously down. Blood sprang scarlet. The knife flashed again and yet again before the Count’s companions could think to move.
Bertrand, far enough away to be slow in coming but also to have had a better view of the attack, lunged through staring, witless bodies – God’s nose; what a stink of wine! – and fell on the shadow with the knife. It was a man, substantial enough, and well wined too from the smell of him. He did not struggle. His voice rasped in Bertrand’s ear. “The king! I did it for the king!”
* * *
Hugh of Jaffa lay in the Hospital of St. John, tended by the holy brothers, wavering between life and death. He had bled terribly from head and body. Not even the chief physician of the Hospitallers could tell whether he would live or die.
“Then he needs a physician who knows his craft!” cried Melisende, and sent one of her choosing: a bearded and turbaned yet avowedly Christian gentleman who had studied in the schools of Cordoba and of Baghdad. He did not endear himself to the Frankish physicians – the gentlest word he had for them was butchers of swine – but with the queen’s authority and a handful of her most formidable knights, he set to work on the wounded man.
* * *
Melisende was in a white rage. Hugh’s cowardice and his flight had angered her, but his wounding roused her to a royal wrath.
The whole mighty weight of it fell on her husband the king. The knight who had assaulted Hugh, a Breton born, enjoyed no great rank or distinction, but he had ambition. “I did it for you, majesty,” he insisted when he was brought before the king. “That traitor walked free in your own city, mocking your mercy with his presence. I disposed of him for the honor of your name.”
“And thereby besmirched it nigh beyond redemption,” Fulk said, no little angered himself. He gestured to the guards who had brought the man in, to whom Bertrand had surrendered him at the palace gate. “Take him to the prisons. He will be tried by the High Court – tried and, if God wills and the Court is wise, put to death.”
The knight wailed like a woman. “Majesty! I did it for you!”
“You did it for yourself,” said Fulk. His voice was iron. “Take him away.”
* * *
Melisende heard of that, even professed to approve it. But her rage was no less. While Hugh lay neither alive nor dead, she would not see Fulk. When her physician sent word that the Count of Jaffa would live, though much weakened and scarred, she went in her own person to the hospital. Hugh was deep in a drugged sleep, bandages concealing the worst of his wounds. His beauty would not be the same thereafter, but she looked on him without revulsion. She looked long. Then she turned on her heel and went back to the palace.
Fulk had been in his workroom, going over accounts with his Constable and an officer or two of the chancery. He had dismissed them and sat at the table to eat a bit of bread and cheese with ale, all the meal he would take on such days as this, when he was too preoccupied with kingship to care what he ate or drank.
Melisende in her fury burst like a storm-wind into that small and windowless room. She was almost too large for it. Those ladies who had kept pace with her were caught without, but they could see and hear well enough: Melisende had not slammed the door behind her. Fulk blinked, as stunned by the force of her as any lesser man.
Her voice when she spoke was soft enough to be startling. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me true. Did you put that murderer up to it?”
“Do you take me for that much of a fool?” he asked her with remarkable presence of mind.
“All men are fools,” she said with grand contempt. “Tell me. Did you?”
“I did not.”
“Swear in God’s name. Swear by Holy Sepulcher.”
“I do swear,” he said without hesitation.
Even yet he had not appeased her. She shook her head, tossing it. “It do
esn’t matter. Whether you ordered it or simply let it be known that you wanted it – a man, crying your name, stabbed the Count of Jaffa in the back. Exile or no, coward or traitor or simple idiot, he never merited so vile a thing.”
“I did not do it,” Fulk said. “I did not order it or will it. I did not wish harm to him. If I had, don’t you think I would have had him put to death when first I took Jaffa? The whole kingdom would have abetted me then.”
“Not all of it,” Melisende said with grim precision.
“Lady,” said Fulk. “Nothing in the world that I do is sufficient to please you. Now even knights who claim to be mine – whose oath I certainly never took conspire to feed your hatred. I grant you right and queenship. I give to you all that your father gave, of ruling and commanding in this kingdom. What more do you want of me?”
“I want that murderer’s life,” Melisende said, “and his limbs one by one. And I want the Count of Jaffa kept safe until he recovers, then sent guarded to Italy. Let no one so much as look at him with disrespect.”
“I had intended that,” Fulk said.
“Then do it.” She whirled on her heel.
But he was on his feet, swooping across the table, seizing her hand. She snapped to a halt. “Lady,” he said. “It was not my fault.”
She would not turn to face him, though his grip must have twisted her arm cruelly. “Prove it,” she said. “Prove it so that no one alive can doubt it.”
* * *
Fulk did what he could. The High Court judged the miscreant, but every lord and baron there knew the king’s will. They condemned the man to death to his great horror; but he had stopped shrieking that he had done it for the king. Rumor had it that certain of his jailers had promised him an unusually slow and painful execution if he said any such thing.
The sentence laid down on him was quite terrible enough. He would be destroyed limb by limb, one by one, and only last and after he had again confessed, would he be granted the mercy of beheading.
That was Melisende’s wrath, though it wore Fulk’s face and authority. Any who ventured to think that Hugh himself deserved a similar sentence for his betrayals, did not dare to speak aloud. Neither the king nor the queen was to be reasoned with, and the High Court was in no remarkably obliging mood, either.
Count Hugh’s would-be murderer was put to death before all the people. His screams echoed for days in many a dream, and his blood ran, as each arm, each leg, and last and only when he had confessed that the king had had no part in his crime, his head, was sundered from his body.
Hugh himself was taken away while still so weak as to need a litter, set gently on a ship and dispatched to Italy. The queen did not bid him farewell. There were many who said that she had no need. Her anger was tribute enough. The chiefs of Hugh’s enemies walked in terror of their lives, dreading a knife in the back. The king himself, it was whispered, slept with no very easy spirit, and kept a knife ever near to hand.
It was, in the end, a victory for Melisende. She found no sweetness in it, or none that she would admit to. She had lost a friend, perhaps her only one, for a bit of vaunting folly. He had promised to come back; but he was sorely hurt. He could die of that on the voyage, or die in Italy of that country’s famous fevers.
And she remained in Jerusalem, queen in fact as in name, ruling beside her husband as was right and proper. Alys, the rebel who lacked an essential grain of sense, remained in exile in her dower lands about Lattakia. The two younger sisters, no longer quite so very young, had the wits to be quiet.
Hodierna was almost old enough for a husband; one would be found for her soon. Sweet-faced Yveta professed to want no husband but Christ. She had been odd since she lived for a year as hostage to the infidels. She had gone away a lively and often frivolous child, but come back silent and withdrawn and conspicuously devoted to the forms of Christian prayer. It would be the convent for her when she was older, and a life of prayerful quiet now, attended by nurses of suitably pious nature.
So it was settled, at least in Jerusalem. There was still the matter of a prince for Antioch, but Fulk had found new strength to contend with that. The likelihood that while he was away his wife’s temper would cool, proved a marvelous stiffener of the will.
She had already come to a kind of thunderous stillness. Her farewell to him as he rode yet again to Antioch, was almost gentle. Perhaps she had grown resigned to this marriage that had been made for her, now that she had power as well as title. Perhaps at last she had understood that, where men were concerned, she had no heart. She was as alien to the thing called love of the body as a virgin saint.
* * *
Richildis could wish that she shared such a blessing. The month she had spent in Beausoleil should have faded long ago in her memory. Yet she still dreamed of it, of dark eyes and black beard and long fingers turning the pages of a book.
The Byzantine had never come to Jerusalem, never written to her, never sent her word or message. That she had never done any of those things, either, managed not to matter in the scale of her indignation.
And then, early in the spring after Hugh left for Italy, a letter came to her by the hand of her brother’s squire. Gabriel professed not to know its contents, but its sender he knew very well. “Michael Bryennius sends greetings,” he says, “and hopes that you remember him.”
It was all Richildis could do to thank the boy civilly – too much aware of the wicked glint in his eye, the too-knowing slant of his brows as he bowed and suffered himself to be dismissed. She realized when it was too late that she should have offered him something of value as well, a coin or a trinket.
Later. She would make sure of it. Now…
She needed to be alone. Melisende’s ladies were variously ignoring her in favor of their own concerns, or regarding her with idle curiosity. For the benefit of the latter she tucked the letter into her girdle and went back to the sleeve that she had been embroidering.
She barely saw the stitches. Most would probably need to be ripped out on the morrow. But they passed a slow and necessary hour, until she was free to go for a while where she would.
She went to a place that she had come to favor, the chapel of the palace. It was quiet outside of the hours of mass and office, not often frequented by anyone except, once in a while, the young Princess Yveta; and she was never inclined toward conversation, except with God.
There was no one in the chapel today. Someone had been there a little while ago: there were candles lit on the altar, living prayers for this cause or that. Richildis knelt and crossed herself and murmured a fragment of a prayer.
Then at last, by the light of the candles, she took out the letter. It was sealed with a device that she had seen before, carved in the ring he liked to wear: a very old stone, old as Rome, a wolf nursing twins under a branching tree.
She broke the seal abruptly, before she could waver further. And why her hands should shake and her heart beat hard, she did not know. It was only a letter from a man she had known for a little while, two years and more ago.
It began simply enough. “Michael Bryennius of the City Constantinopolis to the Lady Richildis of La Forêt in Anjou, greetings and good health. I hope this finds you well and your lady content.
“I had meant to write you before now. I remember how you taxed your brother with his silence, so that you never knew even if he lived. But one grows shy in absence, and you were in the heart of things, and might have forgotten a stranger with whom you shared a book or two.
“Still,” he said, and she could hear it as clear as if he spoke in front of her, “I hope that you will remember, and of your charity, permit a stranger to call on you. I am leaving this country. My enemy is dead; my kin have summoned me back. It seems I’m heir to more than I knew. Of course I have to go; I have no weight of refusal to keep me here.
“Yet there is one farewell I would make, and that is to Jerusalem. And, I confess, to you. Will you allow that liberty?”
There was more, but it mattered l
ittle: phrases of closing and parting, polite inconsequentialities that weighed nothing beside the truth of what he had said. That he was going away. That he wanted to see her.
That he was going away.
She had not seen him in a pair of years. Why should it matter if she did the not-seeing with him in Beausoleil or with him in Byzantium?
Yet it did. Beausoleil she could visit if she would. The City of the Byzantines…
If she would, if her will and her resources were strong enough – she could.
If.
Twenty-Six
A lady in the service of the queen might properly receive a visitor in the ladies’ solar. But Richildis did not find pleasant the prospect of meeting Michael Bryennius again in front of the whole flock of the queen’s ladies. Even those with whom she shared alliance or even friendship, might be too intensely interested in her words and her manner when she spoke to her guest. They had little enough else to occupy them; they were always looking for a new love-affair or a particularly delicious scandal.
Richildis’ virtue had been troubling them for quite some time now. With so many women and so few men, it was no devastating disgrace for a woman to remain unclaimed – even a widow of property, and that property in France, which made it all the more enticing. But Richildis had had no lack of would-be claimants. Young knights mostly, second or third or fourth sons with no hope of inheritance unless they married it, but a baron or two as well, lords of rank and substance in search of a beautiful young wife who would bear sons to fight for the kingdom.
She had turned them all away, gently if she could, firmly if she must. She did not want to marry again. Someday she supposed she must. But not here – not in Outremer. A pleasant gentleman in Anjou, a man of substance perhaps, who had sired heirs enough and who desired a lady to look after his estates, to bear him company, to be his friend and confidante in the ruling of his domain… that, she might welcome, if it were the right man and the right demesne.
Queen of Swords Page 22