Revenge of the Rose (43 page)

“But for you to have to walk in on— “

“The benefits outweigh that,” Jouglet decided briskly, moving to the window to better examine the belt in the sunlight. Willem frowned.

“You are not so unfeeling. In fact you were obviously jealous,” he insisted.

“Obvious to your ruffled sense of honor perhaps, but I assure you it was lost on her. Is this local workmanship?”

“You can feign indifference but you do want an apology. Or at least an explanation.”

“I had the explanation from her— the emperor sent her. Refusing her would have been brainless of you, after what happened yesterday.” She paused, staying artificially focused on the belt, and when she spoke again her voice was a little quieter. “Had she really been here since last night?”

“You see, you do want an apology,” he said, almost eager. It felt good to him that it would matter to her. “Let me make it up to you.”

Jouglet laughed a little. “You just spent an entire night and most of a day riding some tart, how could you possibly have the strength left to give me what I’ve come to expect from you?” She tossed the belt down with apparent indifference, and crossed back to the door. “Get a little rest. Clearly you need replenishing.”

“Where are you going?” he asked as she reached for the bolt.

“To see Jeannette,” Jouglet said offhandedly. “She has a blond fall that is quite fetching on me and entirely alters my features.”

Willem sat bolt upright. “And why would you need that?”

“Dear heart,” Jouglet said smoothly, “I came here with the hope of being ravished, but it appears I must go elsewhere for satisfaction. Obviously I don’t want to be recogni— “

“Jouglet!” he said, horrified. “You will do no such thing— “

“Oh, don’t worry,” she reassured him. “I know how to avoid detection. She used to help me with this sort of thing all the time, we’re a very competent team. Will you
please
come to the court for supper tonight?”

Willem leapt naked out of the bed, and despite herself Jouglet enjoyed looking at his body, blithely ignoring how enraged he had become. “You are not to give yourself to another man!”

She sobered. “You are not to tell me what to do.”

“I won’t have you whoring yourself as my sister does— “

“That is the most ludicrous sentence ever to come out of your mouth,” Jouglet snapped, suddenly fierce. She stepped away from the door farther into the room. “First because Lienor never whored herself, and if you’d give me a chance I would prove it. Second because you can’t
begin
to compare her state and mine, when the whole point of hers is to remain chaste and the whole point of mine is to have liberty.”

“Liberty to do what?” Willem demanded angrily. “Go whoring? Forgive me for stating the obvious, Jouglet, but no matter how successfully you pass as a man with your clothes on, you cannot actually
go whoring.
You can only whore yourself.”

“Hypocrite! I’m simply doing what you’ve been doing— and rather less objectionably, I would say, as
I
am only looking for another partner because my preferred one has
depleted
himself into someone else— “

“You said that was the right thing to have done!” Willem nearly shouted, exasperated and bordering on bewilderment.

“Yes, beloved, it was, but looking at your naked body is driving me desperate with desire and since you— “

“Get on the bed,” Willem ordered in a pitched voice, pointing to it with gratuitous drama. “I’ll show you how depleted I am.”

She threw her head back and laughed bitterly. “Oh, Willem, you are being
comically
masculine.”

“I won’t have my woman giving herself to— “

“I am not your woman,” Jouglet said, with such gravity that he closed his mouth. “I am Jouglet the minstrel.” There was an awkward silence. Jouglet nodded once, wishing the gesture could good-naturedly end the tension. She did not, in fact, have much of an impulse to go strolling the streets of the neighboring villages in disguise, but she would sooner be strangled than let him know that now.

Willem grabbed his robe and put it on, looking self-conscious. Jouglet reached again for the bolt and had nearly pushed the door open when he growled, almost tonelessly, “If you open that door I will tell everyone you are a woman.”

Angrily she slapped it closed and spun around to face him down. “Damn you if you forswear your oath to keep a secret,” she spat. But the rest of the angry admonition surprised him: “Besides, haven’t you learned
anything
? That sort of blackmail should be saved for circumstances in which you would actually
benefit
from carrying out the threat. You’d gain nothing by revealing me, you’d only lose a lover.”

“I don’t want a lover who will blithely go about giving herself to others!” Willem protested.

She pursed her lips together and nodded understandingly. “Neither do I,” she said quietly. “But I would never dream of forbidding it.”

He sighed with exasperation. “I’m a
man.
”

She looked deeply unimpressed by this revelation. “And?” she finally prompted.

He sat on the bed. “I realize you cannot understand this, but part of the benefit of being a man is
being known
as a man.”

She laughed briefly and leaned back against the door, arms crossed. “Nobody appreciates the benefit of being
known
as a man better than I do, duck!”

“But
I lose
by
your
doing that. No one may ever know the truth about us, or you’re undone.”

Jouglet threw up her arms in mock triumph. “Perfect! The model of courtly love. So I
am
your lady after all.”

Willem considered this and abruptly started laughing. “All right then,” he said, a challenge. “Give me your silken glove to wear the next time I ride in a tournament. Let me write bad poetry about your milky white brow, and sing it tunelessly in front of other people.” He laughed a tired-hysterical giggle, and flopped back against the cushions.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh in days,” Jouglet said quietly, without a hint of remonstrance or annoyance. “I suppose all that fornication agrees with you.” A thoughtful pause. “Or rather, all that fornication with someone other than me.” A sigh, and she crossed her arms again, trying to sound casual. “Yes, I suppose Konrad knew what he was doing, we’d better give him what he wants— “

Willem stopped laughing and sat up again. “If you want to be estranged from me entirely— “

Jouglet interrupted him by rushing to his side and kneeling beside the bed, staring intently into his face. “We were the best of friends for three entire years without anything resembling fornication. The deepest part of our regard was born within our friendship. I’m not suggesting we be strangers, Willem. I want us to take delight in each other’s company the way we used to. Now that all the clever plotting has come undone, and we’re left with little resource but each other, and we know we’ll never manage to be lovers in the normal sense— let us be true friends at least.”

“I…” He hesitated, and frowned. “You’ve changed the subject.”

“No, not really. The subject— as usual— is
what are we
? And I’m proposing that we’re friends. Friends who are allied to try to salvage a wrecked set of circumstances.” She sat back on her heels, waiting for a response.

He looked slightly at a loss, then sheepish. “I don’t know how to be…allied with a woman,” he said at last. “While
knowing
she’s a woman.” He frowned again. “Except my sister, who has taught me nothing but that women are false allies.”

“What, again?” Jouglet said with mild exasperation. “Isn’t it enough her future’s spoiled? Must she be subjected to her own brother’s sullying her name? It’s a lie, Willem. You add gratuitous misery to your heart to believe it.”

Willem sighed. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Then do not believe she’s guilty until you must! Why do you dismiss my judgment? When have I ever been wrong?”

He had an immediate response to this: “You thought I would never be intimate with Jouglet the minstrel merely because Jouglet the minstrel was a man.” He laughed, a little bitterly. “With political machinations I trust your judgment. In evaluating my family’s carnal curiosity, I do not. You tend to underestimate us.”

“I can tell you stories about your sister to remind you of her goodness,” Jouglet offered, to avoid another argument.

“And
I
can tell
you
a story that trumps all the others, that proves she has always been a willful little wench who enjoys getting herself and other people into trouble.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ, not
that
again!” Jouglet said impatiently, starting to get up from her kneel on the floor.

Willem was taken aback. “You know what I’m referring to?”

Jouglet froze, not quite standing upright yet, and for a moment seemed to be calculating something.

“I recognize that look,” Willem warned. “Tell me what you know.”

Jouglet bit her lower lip, straightened up, and backed away from him. “I know about the night at Alphonse’s.” He reddened slightly and stared at her. Ignoring his surprise, she planted herself on the chest at the window and went on defiantly, “I fail to see how it suggests your sister is a harlot.”

“How do you know about that? I’ve never spoken of it.”

Jouglet hesitated. She was suddenly a little pale.

“Did Lienor tell you?” he demanded. “I suppose she thought it was amusing.”

Jouglet, like a trapped rabbit, stared at him but said nothing.

“I want to know what Lienor’s told you,” he said. It was polite, but it was a command. “I’m sure she’s skewed the story somehow in her favor. If we are to be allies, let’s set the record straight.”

Jouglet kept looking up at him, at his soft brown eyes and sad expressive brows. She felt her heartbeat quicken a little. This moment had taken her by surprise. There was a long silence as she contemplated the entirety of her enterprise, of everything that had gone well, that had gone wrong, that might still come to pass. She took a deep breath. Perhaps this was the moment that would shift the game back to her cause.

“All right,” she said at last. “All right then, yes, I will tell you the entire story, as far as I am qualified to tell it.” Another pause. She rose from the chest, then after a hesitation, crossed and sat down beside him, facing him, on the bed. “Lienor was eight, you were eleven. Your old steward Jehan, in a fit of misplaced loyalty, sought you out and told both of you the real story, that your father had held land directly from Konrad’s father, but Alphonse, Count of Burgundy, had swindled you out of it when your mother became a widow. Lienor promptly walked three days to Oricourt, to complain to the count for his having taken your land, and you went after her. Actually she went to complain to the emperor, who lay dying in Alphonse’s bedroom. You overtook her in a small grove of old trees near the top of the hill by Oricourt. She did not want to turn back.”

She glanced up at him and saw him staring at her with his mouth slack, hardly breathing. She looked down and made herself continue.

“You argued, you were overheard by one of Alphonse’s men guarding the grove against poachers, and you were taken to the castle. Alphonse put you in prison overnight— well, there was no prison really, so he put you in the dovecote, fenced in between the trap that collected all the pigeon shit, and a hole where they had just put poison down for rats. Alphonse told you he would hang you in the morning, although he later insisted to your mother that had been a friendly joke. The penned-in area was so narrow you had to stand upright side by side all night, and it smelled of birdshit, and rotting rat carcasses, and there was a lot of grain dust in the air that made Lienor sneeze incessantly. You passed the time by telling stories— Lienor’s favorite was a ghost story you came up with about your avenging ancestors. You discussed ways to escape. And then you realized you could, in fact, escape, that Lienor was just small enough to push her way out through the hole the rats had chewed. She ran around to the side door and let you out, and then under a full moon in a clear sky you somehow sprinted through the outer court and slipped out of the cattle list without being seen.”

Willem shook his head, looking weary. “How long did Lienor spend boasting about it, for you to know so many details?” He made a resigned face. “My sister seems to be made of indiscretion.”

“This is not a story about your sister’s indiscretion.”

“Yes it is. Anyhow, she omitted a major part. It wasn’t just the two of us.” He looked deeply pained. “There was another child, my age, old steward Jehan’s girl. She was with Lienor all along— in fact she probably gave Lienor the idea in the first place, she was always getting into trouble.” He winced and reflexively crossed himself. “I understand why Lienor would not have mentioned that, because of what happened. After we escaped, she decided to go back and try again— alone, because I would not let Lienor out of my sight again. And…Oh, God…” He hesitated.

Jouglet, in a gentle tone, picked up the story. “She went back to try again, and was caught. You never saw her again, but a bag containing her alleged innards showed up at your gate a few days later.”

Willem nodded grimly. “So you do know that part.”

“Oh, I know that and more,” said Jouglet. “Shall I tell you what happened when I went back to the castle?”

He gasped in shock and started violently, staring at her, looking terrified. Jouglet gave him an apologetic smile and reached out to take one of his hands in both of hers. It was hard to tell who was shaking more.

“I never claimed I heard the story from Lienor,” she pointed out.

“You can’t,” he gasped, as if he’d been slugged in the stomach. “You can’t have been that girl— “

“I certainly did not
want
to be that girl, that’s why I became Jouglet the minstrel,” she said. “Jouglet the apprentice minstrel, first, of course, who immediately fled Burgundy, and was lucky and gifted enough to be taken in by Konrad’s aging court musician. Jouglet the apprentice minstrel was never rounded up by the count, because Jouglet the apprentice minstrel did not go back to the land of Burgundy for more than seven years, until he had earned his name in Konrad’s court as a youth of prodigious talents.”