Henri came over, reluctantly. “Sister, if you have more schemes involving hats and lying to the French—”
She interrupted, “I need you to go and intercept the messengerfrom Flanders and bring him here tonight.Secretly.La Trémoille mustn’t know. The northwestern road.”
Henri did not look enthusiastic. Madeleine was very beautiful and the rain had not let up.
Anne said sympathetically, “I know. But you may lounge about in comfort after the realm is preserved.”
Chapter
2
Anne’s messenger from Flanders wascalled Baron Wolfgang von Polhaim, a butter-haired and baby-faced Austrian. He met a damp and annoyed young man not a league from the walls of Nantes.
“Hold,” said this young man, pushing back the hood of his cloak. The dyed ostrich feathers on his hat dripped greenish water onto his face.
Polhaim’s hand strayed to the hilt of his sword. Roads were dangerous. The young man did not blink. He added, “You are Polhaim? The messenger from the court of His Majesty of Austria?” The young man’s irritable expression did not quite match the good-natured set of his mouth. He was alone too, riding a very good horse, but with no visible blazon.
“A traveler only,” said Polhaim coolly. His message was secret, after all.
The young man nudged his horse nearer. Low, he said, “I am Henri of Avaugour, the duchess is my sister, and please God follow me now lest we dissolve in this thrice-cursed rain.” He drew his cloak briefly aside, revealing the ermines and sea-serpents embroidered on his doublet, the blazon of Avaugour, with a bend sinister to denote an illegitimate line. The two young men shared a glance, communicating silently.
Polhaim relaxed. “Very well. I would hate to dissolve in the rain,” he said, and touched up his tired horse. “But I fear there is no hope for your hat.”
“Why remind me?” Avaugour muttered.
Avaugour brought them to a pleasant hostelry in Nantes that bore the duchess’s emblems of rope and ermines above the door and stood by, his wet cloak steaming, while Polhaim shifted his clothes. Together they broke some of the hostelry’s excellent bread, sliced with sausages, and Avaugour said between bites, “There are revels in the castle tonight. For the end of Eastertide. Will you go? Or would you rather be here, rolled up in blankets?” Food and dry clothes had rekindled what Polhaim assumed was a habitual spark of humor in Henri of Avaugour’s eyes.
“Not on your life,” answered Polhaim with spirit. He put his cup aside and wiped his mouth. “Will I see the duchess this evening?”
“No,” said Avaugour composedly, although he coughed around his last bite of bread. “She is a virtuous lady who always goes early to bed.”
“Very right, I’m sure,” said Polhaim dubiously. “But I beg you will tell her and her council that I am come with letters from my master. There is little time for revelry.”
“Then let us profit by the night,” said Henri of Avaugour, and pushed back his chair.
It seemed that neither a sleeping duchess nor the fine spitting rain could dampen the hilarity in the great castle of the dukes of Brittany that night. Laughter and talk and the smell of spilled wine drifted from room to room. Before long, Polhaim was roistering without a care, bellowing in a mix of Latin and French, laughing at Avaugour’s vile German. He finally fetched up, half-drunk, somewhere on the third floor of the riotous château, wondering that the young duchess’s councilors did not rein in these pleasant excesses. There were three people drowsing drunk on the spiral stairs.
But this chamber was delightful. Tapestries of flowers and nymphs seemed to dance in the firelight, and all the women wore court-dress, their hair plaited up in gold nets, the paint on their eyes and mouths smeared with the hour and the feasting. This ducal court was smaller and less stately than the court of Maximilien of Austria, but it pleased Polhaim all the same. Not even a short but violent war, only recently ended, could wholly strip the dazzle from Brittany, that fair green country. A few couples danced the volta, wildly, in the middle of the room.
Polhaim danced his own measure with one girl, flirted with four more, and finally found himself sprawled panting at the feet of the most delightful girl of all. Not one of the stately beauties, to be sure, but a short creature in a violet dress, impish and everywhere curved: round face and rosebud mouth and snub nose and soft breast, hair caught up in a crespine. Her brown eyes had the same luster as the pearls sewn into the fillet round her brow.
She did not see him at first. She was on her feet, leading a game of doggerel verses in which the entrants must extemporize poems on themes chosen by their fellows. Each entry was worse than the one before, the whole room in stitches, until finally the last theme—lances—wound down to its scurrilous end—“and then, I saythrust,” someone bellowed indecorously. The girl, laughing, finally met Polhaim’s eyes.
“Madame,” he said. He stumbled to his feet and swept her a bow.
Her laughter quieted but two dimples remained, like thumbprints in the heart-shaped face. Polhaim was vaguely aware of Avaugour watching them. Well, he’d seen the girl first. She sat down with a strange little jerk, and in a less hazy state, Polhaim would have realized instantly to whom he spoke, but the girl was already talking, dabbing at the sweat on her brow and breast with her kerchief. “They say that you are come from Flanders to see the duchess.”
This was perhaps one of her maids-of-honor. But Polhaim’s mission still called for discretion. Smiling, he said, “To enjoy the pleasures of the court, Madame, and to bring reports of it to my master.”
“Oh?” said the girl, lifting distracting brown eyes. “And who is that, Monsieur?”
“A great gentleman.” Polhaim instantly wished he had not said even so much. He was drunk, and also she was the kind of girl who could loosen men’s tongues.
His master, Maximilien of Austria, was one of the foremost men of Europe. Troubadours already sang of his wedding years ago to Mary of Burgundy, whose lands had lain under the rapacious eye of the old French king. Maximilien had loved Mary and gone to war for her and saved her patrimony, and she had given him two children. But she died in a fall from her horse before she could be brought to bed of the third. Her husband’s grief had darkened all the court. It was a magnificent tragedy.
But now the tragedy had a coda.
Anne of Brittany had sent Maximilien tender condolences in her own cultivated hand. She had sympathized, for her own honored father had also died in a fall from a horse. She had, shyly, asked his advice, admitting that her realm also lay under the grasping shadow of France. And Maximilien, still grieving, had offered his hand to this girl, who was beset by France just as his beloved Mary had been.
