Revenge of the Rose (7 page)

“Whatever I am master of is at the emperor’s disposal,” Willem said with quiet earnestness.

“I am sure that is more than your emperor requires of you,” Nicholas replied pleasantly. “But he would be pleased by the sentiment, especially in this corner of the Empire.”

“Will you sit with us?” Lienor asked, and held a dainty hand out to him. She was wearing one of her favorite tunics, made of brilliant green Ghent cloth— a gift from some Flemish knight whose name she did not even remember now. The sleeves were fluted to the wrist, and draped extravagantly, almost ridiculously, to the floor. This made any activity— even embroidery— extremely cumbersome, but for today’s meeting she did not care, because it made her green eyes startlingly greener. Nicholas smiled, with a bow of his head, and kissed her hand without quite taking it in his, or touching it with his lips. “Please have my seat,” she gestured; he sat on the cushioned window seat knee-to-knee with the mother. “Would you like some refreshment?” Lienor asked. “We are blessed with excellent wines. Lisel,” she said to the servant girl without looking at her. “Bring a flagon and a fresh cup for our guest.”

The girl withdrew silently.

“How was your journey?” Lienor asked. She sank onto a brocade cushion at Nicholas’s feet, in a demure posture that nonetheless deliberately offered him an unimpeded view down the front of her tunic. Nicholas, although immune to far less subtle behavior from the ladies of Konrad’s court, found the girl’s flirtation endearing.

“It was uneventful, which means it was very good, thank you, milady.” He glanced around the room. “This is a beautifully furnished chamber, milady.”

She smiled. “Thank you. Nearly all these things are gifts from our friends. The cages of course came with birds, but I let them all go free. My heart weeps to see things caged.” She gave her brother a brief, meaningful look, then returned her attention to Nicholas and gestured to one of the two beds, with a confidential smile. “That is from the Lord of Auxonne, who courted me, although he was married. My brother would not accept the gift, and when His Lordship deposited it anyhow, Willem insisted he reclaim it, but he was killed in a tournament the next day. We have given it to mother, as it seemed improper for me to lie within it.”

“An excellent course of action, milady.” Nicholas smiled. He pointed to a corner of the room, where there was a worn, oval-shaped fiddle on an enameled table set almost as if upon an altar. A faded image of the imperial eagle was visible beneath the strings, between the flat bridge and the fingerboard. “Are you a musician, milady?”

“I play the psaltery, of course,” Lienor said offhandedly, then noticed where his gaze had gone. She smiled. “Oh, yes, the fiddle. That was left here by a fiddler who tried to teach me to play it, after he had been given a much finer one by his patron. I do not have the knack for it, I fear.”

“But my sister sings quite beautifully,” Willem put in. “Lienor, would you please entertain our guest?”

She made a self-deprecating gesture. “Consider his life, Willem. He hears the entertainers of the emperor’s own table, it would be an embarrassment to both of us to subject him to my unsteady warble.” Then she smiled languidly at Nicholas, an expression he interpreted to mean:
I know my voice will enthrall you, but first I want you to appreciate how modest I am.

“I would be honored to hear the lady sing,” he said.

She smiled again, pleased. “Of course I cannot deny the emperor’s ambassador.”

When the wine arrived, she served it to him, then offered him a pillow for his feet, and settled again on her cushion with her carved psaltery, to sing:
“A delicate breeze of longing blows through my lover’s window…”

Nicholas listened, enjoying with dispassionate pleasure the combination of Lienor’s truly childlike smile and not nearly so childlike physical comportment. He glanced at Maria, the mother, sitting in the window seat across from him. She had returned contentedly to her sewing, humming slightly to Lienor’s song. She had not spoken once.

“You have handsome children, milady,” Nicholas said, bowing his head to her. She smiled and bowed her own head to acknowledge the compliment.

“I never dreamed my lover would betray me,”
Lienor was singing. Her voice was very pleasant, if not brilliant.
“For I always yielded to him with a smile.”
And with an expression as sweet as honey, she concluded daintily,
“Oh, God of love, I just want to rip off his accursed head, and I don’t mean the one on his neck.”

Willem grimaced and shot her a chastising look, but Nicholas laughed. “That is how our jongleur Jouglet sings the final verse,” the messenger commented, smiling archly. He’d recognized that weathered fiddle on the table.

Lienor’s entire face widened with her smile. “Jouglet!” she said, delighted. Nicholas nodded. “Brother, did you hear that? I knew this was somehow Jouglet’s doing!” Willem, without speaking, registered flustered, pleased interest. Lienor turned back to Nicholas. “Jouglet has written several songs about me. I wonder if he’s ever sung them for His Majesty?”

Nicholas’s eyes widened. “Is it you? Jouglet is known for his romantic lays, almost as much as his romantic exploits— “

“Romantic exploits?
Jouglet
?” Willem laughed despite himself. Lienor frowned.

“Oh, yes.” Nicholas smiled knowingly. “For a fellow still working his way toward burliness, there is something there already that makes the females swoon, and he has a reputation that pricks his rivals’ jealousy. He will be notorious when he’s older. More notorious than he already is, I should say.” Seeing the squelched outrage on Lienor’s face, he added diplomatically, “But there is only one lady to whom he devotes his poetry, whom he is too discreet to name— he’s let it slip that she is a blonde from Burgundy, so I assume it must be you.”

Lienor was somewhat appeased. “The only one?” she said, with fetchingly wounded dignity.

“The only one. And now that I’ve seen you I am convinced his heart is entirely devoted.”

She smiled. “As long as I have his heart, I don’t much care what he does with the rest of himself. His Majesty’s court must be an excellent assemblage of personalities, judging by the two whom we have now had the honor to know.”

Nicholas smiled at the flattery, so obvious yet so benign. Jouglet had good, if predictable, taste— Konrad would like this one. She would make pleasant company and never bother anyone with willfulness, Nicholas thought.

Until the time came for them to leave.

Maria, her chaplain, and the family’s aging steward had come into the hall for a final interview with an anxious Willem. He assured them Erec had assigned men to guard the property. He advised the steward to remember to air and turn the stored grains and feed his falcon and close the house securely before retiring each night; he advised his mother to air the furs and linens when it was dry outside; he advised the chaplain to deliver alms each morning to the village after mass. He advised them each to do exactly what they had been doing anyhow since before he had been born, and they promised him, smiling, that they would try to remember his instructions.

While waiting for the official leave-taking, Lienor went out the back gate, to the flat and fertile river plain mown low by livestock, to breathe in the green smells of the field and throw sticks for the dogs. She had the rare sort of translucent skin that looked as if it would burn at once under such summer sun, or at least mottle with freckles. Her mother, concerned about that, went to the back gate to call her inside.

“Give her a few moments more,” Willem called out from near the river, where he and his servants were greeting Erec. “It may be awhile before she has the liberty again.”

Lienor froze, stick in hand. A young pup danced about her feet impatiently waiting for her to throw it. After a moment, stunned, she simply gave the stick to the dog, who accepted it with disappointment.

“Brother dear,” she said, using a tone that hinted there was trouble coming. “One might
almost
think you meant for me to be sequestered in the house the entire time that you are gone.”

Without speaking, Willem handed Atlas’s reins to Erec and took a few steps toward her, holding his arms out in a conciliatory way. She backed away, a horrified expression on her face.

“No,” she said, quiet but ferocious. “You cannot mean that, Willem. You absolutely cannot think to keep me penned in the house for what could easily be months. I spend enough time in there, with you out at your accursed tourneys all spring.”

“Those tourneys are our only hope of advancement, sister.” Willem continued approaching her slowly; she continued backing up toward the gate. “Lienor, there is no other way for me to know that I am looking out for your safety.”

“You could trust me!” she cried. “You could trust me to sequester myself when a man comes here. How many male visitors are we likely to have while you’re away? How much of my life would you have slip away inside the house?”

“You make it sound like prison,” Willem said and stopped following her, because he was afraid she would trip on the ludicrous long sleeves of her gown walking backward. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw to his dismay that Nicholas had come out to the back gate and was watching curiously. “You have the run of nearly the entire house, and the whole courtyard as well.”

“The
whole courtyard,
” she mimicked with bitter sarcasm, then suddenly lurched sideways so that she could, moving forward, get past him. “The yard is not thirty paces across and all summer it reeks of manure! I will not do it. Send me to a nunnery while you’re gone, I’d have more freedom there.”

“Lienor,” he said unhappily, reaching out an arm to stop her, but she sailed past him and broke into a run, arms raised to keep from tripping on her sleeves, a hand held up to her crown of flowers so it would not fall off. She ran as if she would try to take wing up into the brilliant blue, or else— more effectively— hurl herself into the shallow Doubs. “Somebody stop her!” Willem called out to the cluster by the river, and Erec obligingly leapt from his horse and darted toward her across the field. She tried to stop and spin off to the side, but he was quick and agile and extremely pleased to have an excuse to close his arms tight around her.

“Let go of me,”
Lienor hissed at him when he had wrestled her to a standstill. “Your breath smells of spoiled mustard.”

“You are being disrespectful to my vassal, your lord and brother,” Erec said. He spoke quietly, mostly because it gave him an excuse to keep his head near hers. Lowering his voice still further— which required bringing his pimply face even closer to her porcelain one— he added, “Do not forget it is the emperor’s messenger you misbehave in front of, cousin.”

“Damn the emperor,” she snarled, but too quietly for Nicholas to hear.

“Cousin!” Erec snapped.

Lienor hurled her headdress furiously to the stubbled ground. Hearing her brother approach them from behind, she said it again deliberately for his benefit. “Damn the emperor. And damn his fussy little messenger. And most of all, Willem, damn your precious Jouglet. Tell him I’ll spit in his face the next time I see him. Tell him I’ll lock
him
away because of some scheme that
I
dream up for my own entertainment— “

“What about Jouglet?” Erec asked, confused. He knew he should offer to hand her over to her brother’s physical custody, but he decided not to make the offer because she smelled too good.

Willem made a dismissive gesture. “We don’t know why Konrad sent for me, so Lienor has decided Jouglet must be behind it for some reason.”

“You tell that stupid little fiddler I’ll bury his face in
mire
the next time I see him. It’s all well and good for you, you’re going out to have an adventure. It’s bad enough I cannot share in it, but I will not be
miserable
so that you may enjoy it.”

With the patience of a grandfather, Willem said quietly, “Lienor, shall you and I have this discussion inside in private? It is inconceivable to me that you would subject the emperor’s messenger to such ungentle behavior.”

She made an awful face at him, then sighed heavily with resignation. “You and I alone,” she agreed and nodded toward the gate. “In there.”

“Yes,” he said, and gestured for Erec to release her, which Erec did quite unwillingly.

They sat facing each other across the table still set up from dinner, each clearly displeased with the other. Their mother anxiously hovered nearby, watching but not speaking. “I’m not a child anymore,” Lienor began in a low voice.

“Then stop behaving like one,” Willem said reasonably. “Anyhow, it’s
because
you are a woman that it is not safe for you to be unguarded.”

“Hypocrite!” she snapped. “You like it well enough that the Widow Sunia is unguarded, don’t you?”

For a moment Willem was too startled to speak. “It is precisely because I know what women may do when left to their own— “

“But I’m nothing like her,
I
am not a
whore,
” Lienor announced defiantly.

“You will not refer to Lady Sunia in such a manner,” her brother informed her curtly, wondering how she had heard about that.

“You help to guard her farms, and she repays you by giving you access to her bodily orifices,” Lienor said impatiently, unimpressed.

Willem blushed, not for the fact of it, but for unexpectedly hearing it from his delicate little sister’s delicate little lips. “The private life of the Lady Sunia is irrelevant to this discussion, Lienor.”

She made a frustrated sound but decided not to pursue it; it would gain her nothing. She tried a new tactic. “We all know why you’re doing this,” she said with exasperation. “You think I’ll seek out mischief if you are not hovering over me. But that was
ten years ago,
Willem. I was a
child.
”

He grimaced. “Lienor, please don’t dredge up— “

“When will you stop punishing me for a childhood mistake?” she demanded. “May I ask how long you intend to keep me on probation for one single, juvenile misadventure?”