For My Lady's Heart (2 page)

“Unshriven they died,” Isabelle whispered, and murmured a prayer. She had
never let go of her grip on his arm, not even to cross herself. “Swear thee
now, in thanks for God’s mercy and deliverance—thou wilt be chaste
evermore.”

He was breathing hard, pushing air through his teeth as he looked at what
was left of Mistress Parke.

“I swear,” he said.

He yanked the horse around and spurred it away down the road in a gallop
for their lives.

Avignon intimidated and disgusted him. In the murky, baking streets below
the palace of the Pope, he stood stoically as Isabelle prayed aloud before a
splinter of the True Cross. Behind her back a whore with bad skin beckoned
to him, striking licentious poses in the doorway, folding her hands in
mockery, running her tongue about her dark lips while Isabelle knelt weeping
in the unswept dirt. His wife had barely warmed to her devotions, he knew
from experience, when the toothless purveyor of the holy relic grew
impatient and demanded in crudely descriptive English that she buy it or
take herself off. The whore laughed at Isabelle’s look of shock; Ruck
scowled back and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder more gently than he
might have.

“Bide ye nought with these hypocrites,” he said. “Come.” She stumbled to
her feet and stayed near him, uncharacteristically quiet as they made their
way through the crowds.

The shadow of the palace fell over them, a massive wall rising sheer
above the narrow cobbled street, pocked with arrow slits styled in the
shapes of crosses, the fortifications crowned by defensive crenels.
Isabelle’s body pressed against him. He put his arm about her, shoving back
at a stout friar who tried to elbow her aside in passing.

She felt cool and soft under his hand. He was blistering hot in his chain
mail and fustian, but dared not leave the armor off and untended as they
moved from shrine to shrine, kissing saints’ bones and kneeling before
images of the Virgin, with Isabelle’s tears and cries echoing around the
sepulchers. Now this new shrinking, her snugging against him, fitting into
the circle of his arm as she’d been used to do made piety even more
difficult to maintain.

He tried to subdue his lustful thoughts. He prayed as they joined the
stream of supplicants forging up the slope to the palace gate, but he was
not such a hand at it as Isabelle. She’d always been a chatterer—it was her
voice that had first caught his attention in the Coventry market, a pretty
voice and a pretty burgher’s daughter, with a giddy laugh and a smile that
made his knees weak—he’d felt amazed to win her with nothing to offer but
the plans and dreams he lived on as if they were meat and bread.

But there had been only a few sweet weeks of kissing and bedding, with
Isabelle as loving and eager for it as himself, before the king’s army had
called him to France. When he’d come back, knighted on the field at Poitiers,
full of the future, triumphant and appalled and eager to bury himself and
the bloodshed in the clean tender arms of his wife—he’d come back, and found
that God had turned her dizzy prattle into prophecy.

For a sevennight he’d had his way with her, in spite of the weeping, in
spite of the praying and begging, in spite of the scolds, but when she’d
taken to screaming, he’d found it more than he could endure. He’d thought he
ought to beat her; that was her father’s advice, and sure it was that Ruck
would gladly beat her or mayhap even strangle her when she was in the full
flow of pious exhortations—but instead she’d beseeched him to take her on
pilgrimage across the heap of war-torn ruins that was France. And here he
was, not certain if it was God’s will or a girl’s, certain only that his
heart was full of lechery and his body seethed with need.

They entered the palace through an arch beneath two great conical towers,
passing under them to an immense courtyard, larger than any castle he’d ever
seen, teeming with beggars and clergy and hooded travelers. The clerics and
finer folk seemed to know where to go; the plain pilgrims like themselves
wandered with aimless bafflement, or joined a procession that ran twice
around the perimeter and ended at a knot of priests and clerks.

Isabelle began to tremble in his arms. He felt her bones dissolve; she
sank from his grip to the pavement, with a hundred pairs of feet scuffing
busily past. As her wail rose above the noise, people began to pause.

Ruck was growing inured to it. He even began to see the advantages—not a
quarter hour elapsed before they had a church official escorting them past
the more mundane supplicants and into a great columned and vaulted chamber
full of people.

The echoing roar of discourse stopped his ears. The ceiling arched above,
studded with brilliant golden stars on a blue field and painted with figures
bearing scrolls. He recognized Saint John and the Twenty Prophets. His eyes
kept sliding upward, drawn by the gilded radiance, the vivid color— abruptly
the clerk pushed him, and he collapsed onto a bench. Isabelle looked back
over her shoulder at him with her hand outstretched and her mouth open as
she and her escort were engulfed by the crowd.

“Isabelle!” Ruck jumped to his feet. He shoved after them. She had been
named heretic for her sermoning more than once. He had to stay near her,
explain her to the wary and suspicious. He floundered into a clearing and
found himself in the midst of a circle of priests in rich vestments. The
robed and tonsured scribe looked up from the lectern with a scowl, the
plaintiff ceased his petition and turned, still kneeling before the podium.

Ruck backed out of the gathered court, bowing hastily. He turned and
strained to his full height, a head taller than most, looking out over the
massed assembly, but Isabelle was gone. A guard stopped him at a side door
and pretended not to understand Ruck’s French, gesturing insolently at the
benches. He glared back, repeating himself, raising his voice to a shout.
The guard made an obscene gesture with his finger and jerked his chin again
toward the benches.

A shimmer of color sparkled at the corner of Ruck’s eye. He turned his
head reflexively, as if a mirror had flashed. Space had opened around him.
At the edge of it, two spears’ length distant, a lady paused.

She glanced at him and the guard as she might glance at mongrels
scrapping. A princess—mayhap a queen, from the richness of her dress and
jewels—surrounded by her attendants, male and female, secluded amid the
crowd like a glitter of silent prismatic light among shadows.

Cold. . . and as her look skimmed past him, his whole body caught ice and
fire.

He dropped to one knee, bowing his head. When he lifted it, the open
space had closed, but still he could see her within the radius of her
courtiers. They appeared to be waiting, like everyone else, conversing among
themselves. One of the men gave Ruck a brief scornful lift of his brow and
turned his shoulder eloquently.

Ruck came to a sense of himself. He sat down on the bench by the guard.
But he could not keep his gaze away from her. At first he tried, examining
the pillars and carved animals, the other pilgrims, a passing priest, in
between surreptitious glances at her, but none in her party looked his way
again. Concealed among the throng and the figures passing in and out the
door, he allowed himself to stare.

She carried a hooded white falcon, as indifferently as if the Pope’s hall
had been a hunting field. Her throat and shoulders gleamed pale against a
jade gown fashioned like naught he’d seen in his life—cut low, hugging her
waist and hips without a concealing cotehardi, embroidered down to her hem
with silver dragonflies, each one with a pair of jeweled emerald eyes, so
that the folds sparkled with her every move. A dagger hung on her girdle,
smooth ivory crusted with malachite and rubies. Lavish silver liripipes,
worked in a green and silver emblem that he didn’t recognize, draped from
her elbows to the floor. Green ribbons with the same emblem laced her
braids, lying against hair as black as the black heavens, coiled smooth as a
devil’s coronet.

He watched her hands, because he could not bear to look long at her face
and did not dare to scan her body for its violent effect on his. The
gauntlet and the falcon’s hood, bejeweled like all the rest of her,
glittered with emeralds on silver. She stroked the bird’s breast with white
fingers, and from four rods away that steady, gentle caress made him bleed
as if from a mortal wound in his chest.

She turned to someone, lifting her finger to hold back the gauzy green
veil that fell from her crown of braids to her shoulder—a feminine gesture,
a delicacy that commanded and judged and condemned him to an agony of
desire. He could not tear his look from her hand as it hovered near her
lips: he saw her slight smile for her ladies—so cold, cold ... she was
bright cold; he was ferment. He couldn’t comprehend her face. He hardly knew
if she was comely or unremarkable. He could not at that moment have
described her features, any more than he could have looked straight at the
sun to describe it.

“Husband!” Isabelle’s voice shocked him. She was there; she caught his
hand, falling on her knees beside the bench. “The bishop speaketh with me on
the morrow, to hearen my confession, and discourse together as God’s
servants!” Her blue eyes glowed as she clutched a pass that dangled wax
seals. She smiled up at him joyfully. “I told him of thee, Ruck, that thou
hast been my good and faithful protector, and he bids thee comen also before
him—to confirm thy solemn vow of chastity in the name of Jesus and the
Virgin Mary!”

Isabelle insisted that he leave off his armor for the interview with the
bishop. Her brief timidity, her snugging against Ruck for protection, had
vanished. All night she’d sat up praying, pausing only to describe in
endless particular the triumph of her examination by the clerks and
officials. They had heard of her—her fame had really spread so far!—and
wished to prove to their own satisfaction that her visions were of God. They
had questioned her fiercely, but she’d known every proper answer, and even
given them back some of their own by pointing out an error in their
orthodoxy concerning the testament of Saint James.

Ruck had listened with a deep uneasiness inside him. He could not imagine
that those arrogant churchmen, with their bright vestments and Latin
intonations, had been won over by his wife. Isabelle attracted a certain
number of adherents, but they were of kindred mind to her, inclined to
ecstasies and spiritual torments. He had not seen a single cleric here who
gave the appearance of being any more interested in holy ecstasy than in his
dinner.

He’d slept fitfully, dreaming of falcons and female bodies, waking fully
aroused. For an instant he’d groped for Isabelle and then opened his eyes
and seen her kneeling at the window next to a sleeping tailor. Tears coursed
silently down her cheeks. She looked so radiant and anxious, her eyes lifted
to the dawn sky, her hands gripped together, that he felt helpless. He
wanted this bishop to give her whatever it was that she desired—sainthood,
if she asked for it.

He dreaded the interview. He was afraid as he’d never been before a
fight; he felt as if he were facing execution. As long as that vow had been
private, between him and Isabelle, it had not seemed quite real. There was
always the future; there were mitigating circumstances; he had not spoken
clearly just
what
he swore to. She might change her mind. They were
neither of them so very old yet. Women were erratic, that was known
certainly enough. He ought to have beaten her. He ought to have put up with
the screams and got her with a child. He ought to have told her that decent
women stayed home and didn’t drag their husbands over the face of creation
in pursuit of canonization. He watched her prayerful tears, his lufsom, his
sweet Isabelle, and could have wept himself.

In the great audience hall he was informed he must wait, that only
Isabelle was required. A hunchbacked man held out his hand, leaning on his
staff, and Ruck put a coin in it. He got a mute nod in return.

All the morning he sat there, feeling naked in his leather gambeson
without armor over it, swallowing down apprehension and despair. There was
no way he could find out of the thing short of disavowing his own words and
revealing himself a false witness in public, before a bishop of the church.
Worse, he was afraid that they might trap him into it, perplex him with
religious questions and turn him about like a spinning top, as Isabelle
could do, until he swore whatever they wished.

Three clerks came for him. He rose and followed them through corridors
and up stairs, until they entered a high, square room. His blood beat in his
ears. He had an impression of silence and intense color, frescoes on all the
walls and many vividly dressed people, before he followed the clerks with
his head bared and lowered. He went down on his knees before the bishop
without ever looking into the man’s face.

“Sire Ruadrik d’Angleterre.” The modulated voice spoke in French. Soft
slippers and the gold-banded hem of white and red robes were all Ruck could
see. “Is it your will that your wife take the veil and the ring, to live
chaste henceforth?”

Ruck stared at the slippers. The veil. He lifted his eyes as high as the
bishop’s knees. Isabelle had never said anything about taking ...

Was she to leave him? Go into a nunnery?

“He hath sworn.” Isabelle’s ardent voice reverberated off the high walls.
She spoke English, but the interpreter’s French words came like a murmured
echo.

“Silence, daughter,” the bishop said. “Thy husband must speak.”

Ruck felt them all looking at him, a crowd of strangers at his back. He
hadn’t been prepared for this. He felt as if a great hand gripped his
throat.

“Do you understand me, Sire Ruadrik? Your wife desires to take the vow of
chastity and retire to a life of contemplation. A placement can be made for
her among the Franciscans at Saint Cloud, if her situation is your concern.”