Sweet Enchantress (3 page)

CHAPTER II

"You were impetuous to challenge the Churc
h openly as you did.” Behind Dominique, old Iolande shuffled back and forth across the windowless cellar room deep within the bowels of the chateau’s donjon. Her hands twisted as if in constant washing, a hygiene that was not part of the Christian faith as it was the Muslim and her own. "Your ruling on the peasant girl’s abortion will have the Inquisition with its torture rack at our gates.”

Dominique continued mixing the
malleable mercury, the soul of metals. "The Dominican idiots answer to Francis, and he would never countenance their interloping within his jurisdiction. Besides, our good bishop of Carcassonne is pleasuring himself in Avignon, hundreds of miles from here.”

The stooped woman halted beneath the wavering light of an oil lamp, suspended from a stone wall. "You are
still in love with him, my pet?”

Dominique put aside the mortar and pestle and turned t
o face her old nursemaid. "Francis de Beauvais is the only man with sufficient intelligence not to bore me. If I were ever to subject myself to the inequities of a marriage contract, he would be the one. The only one.”

Secretly, though, she was glad he was a bishop, so she would not have to make that decision. To her
way of thinking, the ecclesiastical laws of marriage fettered the soul. Francis, with his admirable fluid doctrine, was of the same mind.

Although there were married priests, she suspected quite a few settled for affairs of the heart with the opposite sex. One of the French princes was said to visit a local monastery every morning at the darkest hour for just
such a purpose, but seeking an affair with the same sex.

"Bah, there are other men with intelligent minds, if you would but give them
—”

"You confuse intelligence with education, Iolande.”

“It is merely because Francis dabbles in alchemy.”

"It is because h
e understands that the reality of life is an illusion. That illusion is the only reali—”

"Your mot
her is responsible for this nonsense of yours.” Iolande's seamed mouth pursed. “The Comtessa Melisande and her laboratory! I warn you, the peasants still gossip about her alchemical experimentations. Nowadays their tongues wag that she produced a transmuta—”

Dominique smiled, showing the s
light space between her front teeth that was said to be an omen of good fortune. She knew better. She made her own good fortune. “The peasants gossip about your fairy magic with herbs, Iolande,” she said, parroting Iolande. “Nowadays their tongues wag that our vineyards bloom because of your incanta—”

“—
transmutation that made the de Bar family phenomenally wealthy. And look what happened. Burned at the stake!”

"What happ
ened to my parents,” Dominique said with a sigh of exasperation, "is a result of their harboring Albigensians from the Inquisition.” As well the old woman knew, but for all her loyalty to the late comtessa she nevertheless had abhorred the woman's mystical avocation. "And as for the de Bar wealth, that was due to my mother’s wise management of the de Bar demesnes, if you will but admit it, Iolande!”

"Bah! I
admit you are trespassing on unknown borders!” Fiercely, she cupped Dominique’s face between her withered hands. "To force one's will over other people or nature, like converting iron into gold, can only result in the deepest sorrow. Don’t forget that, Dominique!”

The Co
mtessa Dominique covered Iolande’s hands with her work-stained ones. "I won't. I swear by all the Pope's relics.”

The old w
oman's mouth twisted in a scoundrelly smile. “One is sufficient.”

"The napkin of St. Veronica then?”

They both laughed, but after Iolande departed, Dominique’s smile faded as she went back to work. From a seven-hundred-year-old manuscript, she copied, "Man and woman, the lion and the lily, red and white, sun and moon, sulphur and mercury.”

She laid aside her quill and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. So, sh
e thought, it appears that the philosophers spoke the truth.

Although
it seemed impossible to simpletons and fools, there appeared to be indeed only one stone. "One medicine,” she mused aloud. “One law . . . one work . . . one vessel, all identical with the white-and-red sulphur, and to be made at the same time.”

Countles
s alchemists sought the Philosopher's Stone that would transmute base metal into gold. But she suspected it was something far more potent. She believed the Philosopher’s Stone was a panacea that would free mankind of all sufferings. If only she knew more. Alas, she was but a fledgling alchemist.

Tired, she settled back into her chair, and, resting her chin on interlaced fingers, closed her eyes. The image of Francis came to mind. Like hersel
f, he believed that it was possible to transcend limitations.

She was at a point in her life where she had to know whether there was something more to th
is life beyond the Church's one-dimensional concept of the role of man and woman. The Church's description of metaphysical hierarchy, placing women at the bottom of the list, confounded her.

For a long time, she had wanted to believe that there was something more. That between the realms of physical and intellectual passion was layered a third: the pure pas
sion of the soul. It would be like finding one’s reflection in a silver-polished mirror, she thought. Or finding one’s soul in its complement form in the opposite sex. That belief had become an obsession with her.

Francis
’s marvelously mobile face faded from the back of her lids, to be replaced by that of a villein: the beggar who had sought succor from Montlimoux the week before.

His pres
ence disrupted Montlimoux’s harmony and her own. What others called instinct or intuition told her as much. She had sought out solitude in the oratory, seeking to sit undisturbed and enter a state of relaxed receptivity. It had not come; instead, the beggar had. And as quickly left.

Certain details about him had given lie to
his beggar’s guise. His aura, for one. She saw it as a luminous vapor around him. It had been a pulsating red and orange, whether from dormant anger or his male aggressive energy, she could not decipher. She only knew the aura was its own truth; it never lied. It told the story of who the person was.

The beggar's educated speech, too, was suspicious. Perhaps he was an itinerant scribe or a mendicant friar who had renounced the order. But most of that tonsured society thrived on the blessings of heaven and the fat of
the land. They were a happy and obese community in the midst of the famished.

Though the profession of either scribe or priest could explain his education, there was still his curious
accent. He had to be a foreigner. Not one of the French, for his caressing French lacked the coarse dialect of that
langue d’oil
.

Then there was his stance, nothing like that of a villein. Not with his thumbs hooked arrogantly in his loose rope belt as they had been. She summoned the image of his face, that firm mouth with its
crisply indented upper lip curling disdainfully in a broad face nicked with scars.

She turned inward to find an answer and, after some moments, reached the conclusion that he was a former soldier. Beneath the short-cropped brown hair, his dark brown eyes
betrayed the violence he lived by.

With a sniff of disdain, she dismissed him
from her mind. Undoubtedly, his level of wisdom was far below that of Francis’s.

"Should the king learn of the rumors and legends regarding the chatelaine of Montlimoux,” John Bedford teased, "he’ll most likely rescind his order of creating ye its seneschal and establish himself at its court instead.”

"Edward would be wasting his time. You know yourself that he would rather devote himself to the tourney and other chiva
lrous pursuits.” Paxton could not understand the king’s esoteric cult of chivalry. For himself, there was only the issue of winning.

He glanced back at his baggage train. It snaked over the nearest hill, still coated with winter grass. The trains
’ tail end of pack animals was out of sight. A reconnaissance partly assured the safety of the caravan, as did his pikemen and Cornish knifemen who guarded its flanks.

He imagined Montlimoux
’s chatelaine would not be pleased with the cost of lodging such a retinue: personal retainers, armed guards, chamberlain and marshals, mounted archers from Cheshire, men-at-arms, and English knights.

John reined in his mount. The red-bearded man was bo
rn to the life of a professional soldier, although he had come from a family of humble Norfolk squires. "Come now, Paxton. Confess. Ye are like the rest of us. Ye entertain a fascination for the Round Table romances. Ye know—Merlin, Tristan and Iseult, Courts of Love.”

Montlimoux a Court of Love?

Paxton recalled the supper he had partaken there and the strutting troubadour who had importuned his mistress's attention with verbose, but conventional, poems of courtly love. Amidst the applause of the knights and their ladies, she had absently rewarded him with a kiss on the cheek and a peacock's feather— and shifted her piercing gaze back to him. The woman was impudent. She would soon know her place as mere chattel, categorized along with his ownership of his prized war horse and other accoutrements. This long awaited confrontation had been more than two fortnights in the planning.

The reed roofs of a Montlimoux hamlet came into view, and soon honking geese fluttered from under the hooves of the horses. Recalling
his own humble status at Montlimoux and anticipating his confrontation with its haughty chatelaine, his next remark appeared precipitous and non-sequential. “Let’s stop at the public bath, John, and scrub off the dust of the road.”

John grinned knowingly, his teeth white against the auburn of his beard. “
Aye, my Lord Lieutenant.”

“My Lord Lieutenant?”

“
To be more accurate, my new title is a seneschal of sorts to Montlimoux.”

He had sent ahead green-and-white-capped heralds on horseback to announce his arrival that morning to the Countess Dominique de Bar. In her own
Justice Room he would bring to heel that imperious female. For the occasion, he had chosen not the garb of a courtier, but that of a common soldier. Not a jewel, not a ribbon anywhere. Only a shirt of chain mail over a short padded tunic and mail stockings. And, of course, the sword on his left side; on his right the dagger, the misericord for the mercy it dispatched to the mortally wounded.

At his mild pronouncement, her eyes
glowed like the
feu follet
, those unholy green lights of marsh gas that flitted through England’s peat bogs. Her hands clenched the arms of her justice chair. “A seneschal of sorts? By whose creation?”

"By the creation of the King of England, one of the twelve peers of France, Count of
Ponthieu, and . . .” He paused to emphasize the last. “Duke of Aquitaine, which my Duke-King Edward III holds as feudatory of the King of France.”

She waved a hand of dismissal. “
That is common knowledge.”

“
Perhaps your knowledge doesn’t encompass the fact that within the Duchy of Aquitaine’s boundaries lies the County of Montlimoux.”

Slowly she stood to face him. Her normally tanned face was as white as a winter moon. The barest tremble of her hands betrayed her,
as did the rise and fall of her breasts, indecently exposed by a low décolletage embroidered in old lace. Only the virgin white veil mantling her shoulders offered any modesty. "Those boundaries have never been officially established.”

She was grasping at straws. He lifted one brow, and his smile was as hard as steel. "Exactly
.”

He watched her face, the fleeting, warring thoughts that passed over it. The people of Languedoc detested the English only a little worse than they did the French, whose armies had ravaged the countryside a century earlier in a holy crusade against the
heretical Albigensians. There was no higher power to which she could appeal. Least of all the pope, since Languedoc’s princes and counts had been both tortured and excommunicated countless times over the last century for harboring Albigensians and Jews alike. As she herself had been doing, and her mother before her, and her mother before her.

She drew
herself up, reassuming her mantle of dignity and nobility. "Nevertheless, I am Montlimoux’s comtessa.”

"You never were,”
he said calmly, relishing the moment. "Officially, your fiefdom has been without a suzerain for twenty years, since France adopted the Salic Law, prohibiting females from either inheriting or passing their inheritance on to their descend—”

"I know th
e Salic Law!” She moved forward until she stood a cloth bolt's ell from him. Gardenia, lavender, rose, and other delicate scents he was not familiar with invaded him, making him feel strangely off balance. Behind him, he could sense John and the bodyguards tense. Behind her, the towering and aging Knight Templar, along with her lackeys, stiffened their stance.

"Let me understand you,”
she said in a low voice, her words clipped, her eyes narrowed. "Montlimoux is to be passed to King Edward of England, who claims this land as an extension of his Duchy of Aquitaine?”

"You do show promise of grappling with the intricacies of politics and diplomacy.”

His sarcasm went ignored. She lifted a brow. "Do you not find it curious that the English king claims the duchy nominally his through his French forebear, the female, Eleanor of Aquitaine?”

He shrugged. "Your barbarous French passed the Salic Law, not the English.”
Which had been the source of Edward’s vexation to begin with. By doing so, the French prevented Eleanor’s Plantagenet descendant from inheriting the French crown, now worn by a Valois, Philip VI.

"They are not my barbarous
—”

“
You are most fortunate,” he said in a quiet, but threatening, tone, "that you do not reside in England, where secular law states that the deaf, the dumb, the insane—and the female —cannot even draw up a contract."

"That is in England!”

"Well, then,” he said with imperturbability, “I shall precede on ecclesiastical law, which bases its curtailment of the rights of a woman on her secondary place in creation and on her primary part in original sin.”

A muscle flickered in her clenched jaw. "You are the barbarian!”

“As you are now my vassal, mademoiselle, I could have you whipped in public for such an utterance of disrespect. Let it be your last.”

"Your vassal?”

The moment had arrived. His smile was tolerant. "Now that King Edward has at last put forth his claim as Duke of Aquitaine and now that I, Paxton of Wychchester, have been appointed Grand Seneschal of its County of Montlimoux, you are by law in my custody. You may still assume the title of Countess but you hold neither the authority which comes with that title nor the authority which comes with the one of chatelaine.”

She stared at him. Comprehension of the enormity of what had just transpire
d was evident in the sequence of her facial expressions: doubt, followed by horror, then rage, and, finally, the realization of her helplessness. He half expected her face to turn into a domino of tears.

Defiant in defeat, she turned abruptly to leave the
room with her chin held high. Her retinue stood frozen, unable to cope with what they had witnessed. He let her get as far as the pointed arch doorway, then called, "Mistress, from this moment on, it would be wise of you to take your leave by my permission.”

She whirled around. Her hands were balled, her dusky complexion waxing scarlet, visible even from that distance. "You .
. . I can’t . . . .

He crossed to her justice chair and sprawled in it. He was fatigued from the day
’s journey. "Try,” he told her.

S
he swallowed. The span of a moment passed in which his gaze dueled with hers. "With . . . your . . . permission.” Each word was forced, as if she were choking.

"Messire,”
he prompted.

"Messire!”
A cat could not have hissed any better.

His smile was magnani
mous. "I grant you permission to take your leave.”