Revenge of the Rose (44 page)

Willem shook his head and brought a hand to his temple, overwhelmed. “You must stop
springing
these revelations on me!”

“Perhaps I should have told you when I first revealed myself, but I thought it would be too much at once.”

He held out his arms in a helpless gesture, let his hands fall onto his lap. “We mourned for you. We thought you were dead, I thought it was my fault for not stopping you.”

“I mourned for both of you. For everything I left behind. But I couldn’t risk going back or even sending word. I’d have been hunted down.”

“Why? What happened?” His eyes widened. “Alphonse doesn’t know it’s you, does he?”

“If he knew, I would be longtime and extremely dead,” Jouglet assured him. “The day after our night in the dovecote, when he realized his right to your land could be called publicly into question, he forged a document purporting to be the old emperor’s revocation of the estate from your father, and immediately granting it to himself.”

“How do you know this?”

She held up a hand. “I’m explaining. He had a cohort in his forgery— can you guess who?”

“His nephew Paul,” said Willem in a tired voice, suddenly understanding the entirety of the cardinal’s behavior toward him.

“Yes, who was angling for the archbishopric of Burgundy and no doubt told himself the bond of church and state needed this sort of nepotistic boost. His assignment was to briefly ‘borrow’ his father’s signet ring to seal the forgery. That was easy to do— Paul and Konrad were standing vigil at the emperor’s deathbed right there at Oricourt. Paul and his uncle were in the chapel penning the forgery, and Paul was antsy to get the ring back on his father’s finger before Konrad noticed it was gone. I slipped into the courtyard by the chapel gate, and the chapel was half-sunken— I happened to be sneaking by the chapel window as they were arguing about using the ring to seal the forgery. The document was lying on the window oriel. When I realized what it was, I just stuck my hand in and grabbed it without thinking— it was
right there,
those idiots, it was too tempting. They caught me, of course, got it back from me, and Alphonse was about to kill me— but I have very sharp teeth. I wriggled out of their hands and ran away.” She smiled almost sheepishly. “As I wriggled, I managed to abscond with the emperor’s signet ring. I just grabbed at it, impetuously— I think at the time I only half-knew the magnitude of what it was to have it. They’ve been looking for me ever since. Looking for
her.
And meanwhile of course Count Alphonse claimed he’d caught me doing something or other of an upstartish nature and executed me— those innards probably came from a pig— to send you the message not to meddle anymore, and so I became officially dead to the world. But they kept looking for her. They’re still looking for her, in fact. She’s taken on mythic proportions in their guilty souls, I think and hope.” She took a long and careful sigh, as if she had been holding her breath for far too long. And shrugged.

Willem reached out a beckoning hand. She moved nearer to him, and he wrapped both arms around her in a long, silent embrace, almost crushing her against him. After a moment of internal hesitation, she put her arms around him too, and rocked him.

When he had regained himself, and spent a while stroking her face and hair, staring at her eyes, trying to recognize the child he had known, he said grimly, “I am going to kill the count.”

“No you’re not,” she informed him firmly. “You’re going to marry his daughter and get your land back through her dowry. What do you think I have been working toward all these years?”

T
hey
had merged onto the main trade road up the Rhine valley, which was far more crowded than Lienor would have expected. Many of the people they encountered were familiar to her, or at least expected, especially the churchmen: messengers wearing the papal insignia, a bishop circuiting his see, monks and occasionally nuns, floods and floods of summer pilgrims. And of course in the summer heat there were regular messengers as well, and soldiers riding to or from assignments, and then on foot there were tinkers and peddlers and Jewish merchants and poor freemen seeking harvest work, peasants sneaking toward the freedom of town walls, shepherds and cowherds moving their charges. There were cripples and lepers, ringing bells to warn of their approach. There were itinerant musicians and other performers, which gave Lienor a pang: a part of her was disappointed that Jouglet had not come storming down to Dole in her defense.

She was tired, and sore, and in need of sleep. The sun was covered by a white glare of clouds that made her squint; she could hear her mother’s quiet admonition not to, and had mostly kept her face behind the veil— but she had to see, or she became nauseated after more than five miles in the saddle. Her initial zeal had worn off; her distant reputation seemed a trifle compared to the immediate well-being of her body. She was aching all over; organs and muscles she had never been aware of before were crying out in constant protest. She couldn’t believe a party could ride so far and still not come to its destination. And the valley was settling itself for a storm from the southwest: the air became heavier and wetter, so wet that Erec could not get the torch of hay to light, to chase away mosquitoes with the smoke. There seemed to be no local lord within miles; they would have to stay the night at an inn, if they could find one, something she had never done or ever contemplated doing. She knew only the inn in Dole, the locus of whores and drunks and greasy-faced merchants.

The world was huge, and loud, and dirty, and unsafe. At every moment she fought the urge to beg Erec to take her back to Dole.

T
he
royal court would be moving to Mainz for the August first Assembly, which Konrad had sworn that spring would feature the publishing of the imperial marriage banns. The court was always followed to such Assemblies by its many unofficial sycophants, concubines, and general hangers-on. Konrad had invited Willem although Willem had, after the event in the cellar, once again disappeared from court. The first day, of course, had been largely taken up by his riding Konrad’s concubine, and Konrad could excuse that. In fact, he’d publicized it, and made Jouglet do likewise. Willem’s failure to appear the second day was rather more irksome, and Konrad contemplated revoking the invitation to Mainz. “We’ve resurrected the good name of his cock, but not the rest of him,” the emperor groused to his musician. “I don’t know who’s more infuriating, him or Marcus.”

Willem’s absence was even more irritating to Jouglet. She knew the reason for it. Willem insisted, without irony, that his absence from court was the necessary first step to recovering his place there: she had made him swear not to confront Alphonse and Paul publicly, and he did not trust himself to refrain from attacking either of them until he had his emotions under control. So he’d headed out early in the morning with a bow and several quivers, to take out his rage on the local wildlife. By noon, several boars had gone to their swinish reward, but Atlas was lame from Willem’s careless overexertion. The knight sobered himself with effort, dismounted, walked beside his horse back to the inn, and gave Atlas over to the expert care of the groom there. The exertion of a mountain trek did nothing to calm him, but it was by then too late in the day to continue his antiswine crusade even with a hired mount, so he retreated to his room, having decided the safest way to rein in his anger was with drink. An hour later, his rage was thoroughly drowned by good Moselle wine, but so was the rest of his character.

That evening, as the air grew unnaturally still outside in anticipation of a coming storm, Jouglet lambasted him from across the room while he lay, naked and tentatively hopeful, on the wide bed. “You’re as bad as Partonopeus,” she chided, just arrived to deliver an invitation to the court for supper. “Who’d’ve sooner been eaten by wild animals than get over his passivity when those in power were manipulating him.” She took a step from the door to pick up Willem’s sword, which lay discarded where he’d dropped it after badly damaging the low rafters of the room. She found the sword belt and resheathed the weapon. She took in a deep breath. “Ah, the odor of freshly slaughtered oak.”

“I’ve already paid the damages,” Willem slurred defensively, when Jouglet made a gesture toward the splintered wood. “I just needed a little exercise.”

“We are going to salvage your marriage to Imogen. That means you show up at Koenigsbourg and cozy up to Alphonse.
Now.
I will not have all my years of preparation thrown away in a drunken binge. You’ll lose even Konrad’s regard soon if you don’t pull yourself together, and then what will you be? A landless knight who’s fallen out of favor, rumored to be a sexual deviant and brother to a harlot. And a drunkard, if you’re seen like this.”

Willem looked down at the sculpted expanse of his flesh. “But a
magnificent
drunkard, I’ve been told,” he slurred, with a sad little laugh.

“Stop that! Your future is bleak without Konrad’s regard, and Lienor’s future is
ruined
if Marcus is not exposed. I have a new idea for tripping Marcus up. Are you sober enough to follow it?”

Willem lay back on his bed, looking weary. “Your belt looks like it wants to be untied, Jouglet, come over here and let me help you with it.”

“Enough!” she snapped. “
Your future.
We need to guarantee your future. Without position or property, how shall you provide for Lienor and your mother? Hunting boar and bandits, do you think?”

Willem was not of a mind, at this moment, to try to guarantee anything but a round of fornication safely completed before his servants returned for the evening. He grinned at her with the disarming sheepish smile that so many women liked, the smile that was out of place on the handsome, battered face. “I promised you to be obedient tomorrow and you know I never break my promises. But it’s not tomorrow yet. So here’s my answer for today: As long as you’re in my future, I’m content. Or rather, as long as I’m in you while you’re in my future, I’m content.” He laughed drunkenly and shifted on the mattress, patting the space beside him near his groin. “Let’s start working on that right now, shall we?”

She made a pained face. “Willem, you’re wasting time! I don’t belong in your future that way, don’t you understand that? We need to get you a wife, and she needs to be Imogen. You must start cozying up to Alphonse. Can you
possibly
pull yourself together enough to come up to the castle tonight and charm him? And Konrad? And— “

Consternation flashed across his face. “What do you mean you don’t belong in my future?”

“I mean as a lover. I’ll become very inconvenient to you, and it will be best to keep me as a memory. That’s how it should be, Willem.” To appease him she crossed to the bed and perched beside him, and even ran her hands across his chest. That was a mistake because it made her want to run them across the rest of him. She pulled away a little.

He had paled visibly in the light from the window. “This is the first time you’ve said such a thing. If that was part of the plan you should have told me so.”

“Of course it wasn’t part of the
plan,
” Jouglet argued. “The
plan
never involved us becoming lovers in the first place. The
plan
never involved half of what has come to pass.”

He sat up, the fearful, confused look increasing, trying to think clearly through the haze of inebriation. “Everything you do is for a reason, even your beneficence is part of some scheme. Tell me where I fit into that. I have a right to know.”

She made an enervated gesture and took one of his hands in both of hers. “Schemer that I am, it was an innocent and schemeless impulse that began all this. I wanted to see justice done. That meant your land restored to you and your sister married well. My life was uprooted and permanently changed— what else to do but try to resurrect your lives as they should have been, which might have let me resurrect my own?”

He looked hopeful and reached out to curve his hand around her waist. “Your resurrected life will be as my steward’s heir, Jouglet, we can be together always— “

She stopped him gently with a raised hand. “I don’t want to resurrect my old life anymore, Willem. I much prefer what I’ve grown into over what I was.”

“Then why need you bother about the rest of it?” he asked, almost plaintive. “When it would separate us?” He reached up to stroke her face, but she batted his hand away, looking pained and serious.

“I bother about it for the satisfaction of seeing a wrong righted—
two
wrongs now, with Lienor’s reputation to restore— and seeing Paul and Alphonse fittingly discomfited, and Marcus brought to task, and really, just for the thrill of seeing what a runaway serving girl can effect in the world— for all of that, I chose to do all this. I thought I could do it alone. I was wrong. I need— and want— your help.” She saw a small, hopeful smile warm his face, and she shook her head apologetically. “But not as my white knight, Willem. We have to beat the villains at their own game, which is politics. I know you disdain that game, and that disdain is to your credit— I envy you the luxury of it, and so does Konrad. But you defeat a decade of my life, if you will not help me now by playing the game, and playing to win.”

For the first time in her memory she felt her throat constrict with sobs. When Willem, struggling toward sobriety, bundled her gently into his warm naked arms, she wept.

I
t
was the feast of St. Anne and they should have reached the castle, but there was a downpour so severe that even sections of the raised road were flooded out. The innkeeper in Colmar— who looked to Lienor’s veiled eyes like the prostitutes, the drunks,
and
the greasy merchants of the inn in Dole, all rolled up into one— assured them that when the rain stopped the waters would go down again immediately, since they were far from the river and the land here was never oversaturated; however, it was best not to venture forth until the storm had quieted.