Marcus looked at the minstrel thoughtfully a moment and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”
* * *
Worried, Jouglet left Koenigsbourg and hurried down into town. As she neared Willem’s inn from the green market, a baritone roar of fury, humiliation, and hurt resounded from the building. She had never heard Willem raise his voice before, except briefly on the tourney field. She had certainly never heard him— or could ever have imagined him— sounding like this, and for a moment she was actually frightened of approaching.
Inside the courtyard, the inn workers and Willem’s retinue were running around anxiously, moving to and from the stable under the hall.
Willem and Erec, both with very black looks, were standing on the shadowed side of the small yard, near the stables, brusquely ordering their mounts prepared for travel. They were arguing loudly about how much to bring with them, each freely taking out their distress on the other. As a groom lead Atlas out of the shadows and began to check his girth, Jouglet, arms waving to get the men’s attention, demanded, “What are you doing?”
“Can’t you tell?” Erec snorted. Willem turned away and busied himself with an imaginary task involving the water trough. “We’re going back to Dole.”
“No, you’re not,” Jouglet announced, eyes widening in alarm. “Send Nicholas. Send somebody else. You can’t leave— “
“This is a family matter and none of your concern,” Erec said sharply, looking around for his riding gloves. A groom held them out, and Erec snatched them out of his hand as if they had been stolen; the groom rushed back under the eaves to fetch Erec’s Arabian. “You have already meddled far too much. I am the head of our family, and I say we’re going home.”
“You can’t,” Jouglet insisted. “That would look like an admission of defeat.”
“Idiot!” Erec shouted, finally turning his full attention on the minstrel. “We’re already defeated! My spurs!” he shouted furiously around the courtyard, although the man who had them was already kneeling by him to attach them to his boots.
“Willem,” Jouglet said desperately. “You must not leave here. It’s the worst thing you can possibly do. Stay here, near Konrad. Send for Lienor and allow her to defend herself— “
“You accursed meddling whoreson! Your reign of managing my family’s fortune is over, do you hear?” Erec shrieked in a constricted voice. His eyes were tearing up. “Leave my cousin in peace!”
“Willem,” Jouglet said again, more quietly this time. The knight had kept his eyes focused on his imaginary task at the water trough, but now he turned and faced her. His eyes were red and swollen. He shook his head, determined.
“Damn it, Willem, how can you possibly believe this story?” Jouglet demanded. “It is your sister we are speaking of! Lienor! How can you doubt her?”
“How can I not?” Willem said brusquely, his voice catching. “Marcus knows what he could not possibly know if she were innocent. Not just the birthmark, although that’s damning enough. He described my sister’s character with the intimate exactness of someone who knows her directly.”
“Many people know her directly!” Jouglet shot back. “She has a world of friends and admirers! Some rejected suitor might have spun a tale that told him enough— “
“None of her rejected suitors know about the birthmark,” Willem argued.
“I didn’t even know about the birthmark!” Erec interjected, stamping the foot that had just had its spur attached. He sounded almost indignant about it.
“We’re going home to confront her,” Willem explained, as if that ended the discussion, and took Atlas’s head from the groom.
“We’re going home to punish her,” Erec corrected furiously. His face was almost liver-colored with rage, and Jouglet felt a horrible foreboding: Erec both venerated and lusted after his pretty cousin. The cousin who had just shamed the family beyond all imagining with her own lust.
Erec’s horse had been brought into the sunlit yard now, and a stableboy checked the girth and bridle. Willem mounted Atlas. The page boys and the manservant, Jouglet realized now, were moving with antlike determination between the rented room and the yard, where traveling chests were yawning open to receive whatever the men could not ride out with right away— the accumulated miscellany purchased with Konrad’s hundred pounds. The rented room would be abandoned by tomorrow morning.
Jouglet fought off a wave of panic. “I promise you— ” She stepped up to Atlas and took hold of the reins. “If you send somebody for her and remain here, dignified, at court, there may be some remedy. If you flee in shame at a rumor, there can be none.”
“I cannot stay here and face this shame,” Willem hissed in a troubled voice, pulling the reins tight against Jouglet’s grip.
“Facing the unpleasant is a knight’s duty,” Jouglet upbraided him. She laid a soothing hand on Atlas’s nose as the horse fidgeted under its master’s tension. “Willem, I’ve proven to you that I know how to play these games better than you do— and I certainly know them better than this hotheaded child,” she added, too angry to be prudent.
“I am not a child,” Erec shouted. “I am his lord, and on this matter Willem must do what I tell him. He’s my vassal!”
“He shouldn’t be your vassal and he won’t be for much longer, if he stays here,” Jouglet countered, her voice rising. This accomplished what it was meant to: Erec was confused by the assertion and, for a moment, distracted trying to decipher it.
Jouglet tightened her grip on the reins; Willem looked down at her, frowning. “You are caught up in Erec’s rage,” she insisted quietly. “This is appallingly shortsighted of you. You cannot leave. If you don’t have your sister’s marriage to buoy your fortune, you still have your own merit, but you can only make that evident by staying right here under Konrad’s nose. You know I’m right. Besides, this is a twisted scheme of Marcus’s that I know I can unravel. It has no staying power.”
Willem’s face buckled with confusion.
“Come, Willem, we’re off,” Erec said with a grunt, waving the groom aside impatiently and hoisting himself onto his horse. As he settled into the saddle, he noticed the hesitation on his cousin’s face. “Dammit, don’t let that…fiddle player…stand in the way of family honor! He’s probably only protecting her so he can rut with her later himself.”
“That much is inaccurate,” said Willem, shaking his head.
“It’s all inaccurate,” said Jouglet, nodding hers.
There was a tense pause. Erec’s mare, reacting to his agitation, became likewise agitated. He turned her in quick, tight circles, each one spiraling a little closer to the open gate.
Willem sighed. Then: “We’re staying, Erec. Jouglet is right.” The authority of a knight speaking to his squire hardened his voice, and Jouglet was relieved to see Erec’s comportment shift ever so slightly; he was Willem’s lord by law, but in real life, the elder cousin, though milder, was the natural leader. “We’ll send a messenger,” Willem decided heavily.
“I don’t believe this!” Erec screamed, his horse beginning to dance sideways with excitement. “Blackguard! Opportunistic beggar!”
Willem looked burdened, but he would not change his mind now, and Erec knew him well enough to realize that. Jouglet quickly signaled the grooms to come and take the horses’ heads.
Then Erec suddenly threw his shoulders back, shedding any hint of a squire’s humility. “Well, whoreson, if I am the only one in the family who cares about honor and justice, so be it! I’ll travel even faster on my own!”
Jouglet, anticipating Erec, leapt at his horse, grabbed his booted leg, and tried to pull him off. He kicked at her shoulder, hard, and she landed with a pained grunt on the courtyard cobblestones. With a click of the tongue and a shift of his weight in the saddle, Erec had his horse turned around and racing out the gate and to the right, toward the southern road out of town.
Jouglet accepted a hand up from one of the grooms, then scrambled toward the gate, clutching her should
er. Squawking poultry and startled children in the street were the only immediate evidence of Erec’s flight in the slumbering merchants’ market. Hearing the clack of hooves behind her, she shied toward the gate post, and then she shouted with frustration: Willem was cantering out after his cousin.
“No!” she screamed. “Willem, no!” She forced herself to leap forward and grab at his bridle as he too turned right, and Atlas shied and stumbled. Cursing, Willem pulled the charger up.
“He’ll hurt her!” Willem said in a panicked voice.
“He can’t get to her, she’s sequestered, remember?” Jouglet insisted. “And it’s many days ride to Dole, that adolescent rage will have exhausted itself. Your best hope of defending your family’s honor is to stay here and act honorable.” Willem, unconvinced, glanced up at the settling dust that Erec had left behind.
Jouglet could not make herself say any more than that; she was as uncertain as Willem was of what Erec was actually capable. Part of her was afraid that it really was dangerous for Lienor, letting Erec go there without Willem as a moderating influence.
She released the bridle, hoping her uncertainty was not readable.
“Do what you will,” she said curtly. “I’m just a fiddle player.”
Willem hesitated another moment, until he turned Atlas sharply around and trotted back into the courtyard with a groan of frustrated capitulation.
Jouglet allowed as much time as she thought it would take for him to dismount and collect himself, then went in to comfort him.
But Willem was not in sight. The servants, who were hovering near the traveling chests without unpacking them, glanced meaningfully up at the door to his room. Jouglet nodded thanks and ran up the steps, casually beginning to throw open the door— but Willem was standing against it on the other side to hold it closed. “It’s me, let me in,” she said.
“Go away,” she heard him answer through the thick wood planking. “You got what you wanted. I’m staying. But don’t ask any more of me today. This is not a time for me to be receptive to duplicitous women of any sort.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jouglet laughed harshly, and shoved at the door with her shoulder. “Let me in. Or better yet, come out and return to the castle with me to undo this damage immediately. The longer you wallow the less chance we have of rectifying— “
“The last thing I need right now is your trying to arrange things to your liking. Whether it’s true or not, this only happened in the first place because you lured me away from home with dangerous ambition. Go away.”
“Willem, please, let me in,” she said more gently.
“I told you to go away,” the answer came, slightly choked and nasal.
She stood waiting by the jamb to hear his footsteps move away from the door, but they didn’t, and after a while she realized he was waiting to hear her move away as well. Feeling impotent, she made a face at the door and slammed the heel of her hand against it. “All right, I’m going,” she muttered loudly.
There was no answer on the other side except a muffled, angry sob. Suddenly she doubted the wisdom of insisting that he stay.
She pulled away and made her way sulkily down to the yard. For a short while she remained on the bottom step to Willem’s room, unmoving, occasionally glancing up. But the door did not open, and before very long she made a gesture of resigned disgust toward it, rose from sitting, and walked out of the yard.
* * *
That night His Eminence the Cardinal jotted with pleasure in his regular dispatch to Rome that His Majesty Emperor Konrad might be persuaded after all to marry the daughter of Besançon, a lady whose devotion to the advancement of the church was unassailable. His Majesty Emperor Konrad took supper in his room, alone, nothing to distract him but the pointedly lugubrious music of Jouglet the minstrel. Alphonse, Count of Burgundy, sulked by candlelight in his guest chambers and considered what his options were. Marcus the steward, not often a religious man, stayed up all night with a votive in the castle chapel. And Willem Silvan, knight of Dole and new hero of the realm, paced in his rented room at the inn and stared blankly out the window at the fat rising moon, knowing that something inside him was broken.
13
Débat
[a medieval poem in the form of a two-person debate]
20 July
His Majesty awoke under his silks and wools and furs. Boidon stoked the ashes of all three tiled hearths, emptied His Majesty’s chamber pot out the window, drew open the bed curtains, swatted the dogs off the coverlet, attended His Majesty’s rising, and draped a mantle over him.
The morning fog was as grey as the monarch’s mood. Konrad stretched to warm himself before the fire in his dayroom, while in the bedchamber Boidon silently stripped the top sheet and pillows from the bed and put them out to be laundered. Then he combed His Majesty’s hair and beard with a sturdy ivory comb and helped him into his hose and boots.
Finally, staring dully at the fire, Konrad said, “Send for Marcus.”
When Boidon was gone, Konrad glanced at the form that was curled up on the cushion of the window seat, under a blue woolen mantle. “Give me a tune,” he said, and looked back at the fire. “Let’s mourn the death of fantasy together.”
Jouglet, who had been awake since the bell tolled lauds, brooding on the situation, pretended to stretch, to blink in the foggy light from without, to come gradually to wakefulness. “What does Your Majesty refer to?”
The emperor shook his head, still looking at the fire. “None of that, my friend. You knew the girl yourself and I know how you regarded her. How dreadful this is for Willem.”
“May I speak freely, sire?” Jouglet said, pushing away the mantle and adjusting her brown tunic. Not waiting for the answer— knowing he would say yes, but only halfway mean it— the minstrel continued: “I believe the lady has been maligned, or Marcus fooled somehow. Send for her, Your Grace, and question her yourself before you alter plans that meant so much to you.”
“If she can deceive her brother so thoroughly, she is a consummate liar and her word cannot be trusted,” Konrad said.
Jouglet declined to point out his spectacularly circular reasoning and instead tried this: “Bring her here to be examined by a midwife to see if she’s still virgin, sire.”
Konrad lifted himself up in the chair to glare over his shoulder directly at Jouglet. “Good God, what are you thinking? I cannot sponsor such a humiliating indignity. Imagine what gossip that would subject her to, especially if Marcus is proved honest.”
“But if she’s a maiden, then— “
“Then I’m marked as an emperor who would do that to his bride,” Konrad huffed, slouching back into his seat. “Can you imagine how that would get warped and turned against me as it spread across the miles?” He sighed with frustration. “I am the Holy Roman Emperor, there are certain things I do not do.”
“It could be done in secret, sire,” Jouglet whispered, trying not to sound desperate.
Konrad looked over his shoulder again with an incredulous expression. “This is the royal court! Nothing is a secret long here— God’s balls, Jouglet, you’re the one ferreting out the secrets half the time, how can you make such a ludicrous suggestion? Give me a song, I said, not advice. Something about dashed hopes.”
Jouglet pulled herself off the window seat and squatted by her fiddle case, contemplating how to mitigate the sense of catastrophe around what had happened. “Forgive me for being impertinent, but His Majesty has never even met the lady— it is not as if you suffer any personal loss over this.”
Konrad gestured impatiently for her to open the leather case. “True, the dashed hopes are mostly Willem’s— but mine as well, for losing the chance to call him brother. Don’t play any of those dance tunes you’ve been working on.”
“He is still your brother in arms,” Jouglet said, picking up the instrument and tapping each string in turn to check the tuning. “Appoint him a member of your court and he’s as good as family.”
“I k
now,” Konrad conceded. “But there was a sense of…I don’t know what to call it, domesticity perhaps, at the prospect of our becoming real family. I’m fond of the man. Genuinely. He is so blessedly unlike the members of my court. Or my born kin.”
“So’s his sister, sire,” Jouglet commented with apparent dispassion, listening hard to the third string.
“None of that, Jouglet,” Konrad warned.
“Whatever she is accused of, he need not suffer her fate.” Jouglet lowered the string half a notch and sounded it now against its neighbor.
“Of course not, but I had intended a household that included Marcus and Willem as my companions, and it will be a long while before they’ll be easy in each other’s presence, no matter how much I would will it. I do not like circumstances I cannot control through my own will.”
“Provençal, French, or German?” Jouglet asked, settling on the stool with the fiddle on her lap, raising the bow. “Blondel de Nesle seems appropriate today, or perhaps Ventadour— “
But a quiet rap on the door preempted the performance, and Marcus entered, slowly, almost sheepishly. He and Jouglet ignored each other; he crossed straight to Konrad’s hearthside chair and bowed deeply. “Your Majesty,” he said in a quiet voice. “You have done me the honor of sending for— “
“Shut up.” Konrad sighed and gestured to a chest, where a flagon of wine had sat forgotten overnight beside a pewter cup. Marcus immediately filled the cup and handed it to him. “I only called you up here because I do not want you walking on eggshells around me.”
“Your Majesty has forgiven me?”
“My Majesty doesn’t need to forgive you if you’ve done nothing treacherous. Your friend Konrad is extremely irritated, but even he knows that is not your fault, you were a victim of capricious fate.”
“Thank you, sire, indeed I was,” Marcus agreed.
“Mind you, if I discover more to the story, Marcus, you are a dead man,” Konrad went on. “If you forced yourself on her, or tricked her, or took her knowing who she was— there is no benefit in this for you. If this proves to be some scheme to get Lienor for yourself— “
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