The She-Wolf (The Accursed Kings, Book 5) Read online

  And thus it was that the highest personages took notice of Guccio, and, so he thought, without any interested motive, but simply because he could inspire them with feelings of friendliness, owing, no doubt, both to his intelligence and his particular way of conducting himself in the presence of the great of this world, which was simply a natural gift he happened to possess.

  Oh, why had he not persevered? He could so easily have become one of the great Lombards, as powerful among the nations as princes, such as Macci dei Macci, the real keeper of the Royal Treasury of France, or perhaps like Frescobaldi in England, who had access to the Chancellor of the Exchequer without having to be announced.

  After all, was it too late? In his heart of hearts, Guccio felt he was his uncle’s superior and capable of an even more remarkable success. For good Uncle Spinello, if you looked at it objectively, was engaged very largely in purely short-term business. He had become Captain-General of the Lombards of Paris mostly because of his seniority and the fact that his colleagues knew they could trust him. He had common sense, of course, and indeed a certain cunning, but no very great ambition, nor any great talent to justify it. Guccio could look at these things quite impartially, now that he had grown out of the age of illusions and felt himself to be a man of sound judgment. Yes, he had been wrong over the deplorable affair of the child born to Marie de Cressay. That had been the cause of it all. And then his fear – and this he had to admit – of being beaten to death by Marie’s brothers!

  For long months afterwards, his thoughts had been full of nothing but this unhappy event. He had been a prey to disappointed love, to despondency, to shame at seeing his friends and patrons after so inglorious an episode, and to dreams of revenge. He had been obsessed by these thoughts while beginning a new life in Siena, where no one knew anything of his unhappy adventure in France, except what he might care to tell them. Oh, she did not know, that ungrateful Marie, she did not know the great destiny she had destroyed by refusing to elope with him. How often he had thought bitterly of it in Italy. But now he was going to avenge himself.

  And suppose Marie suddenly declared she still loved him, had been waiting loyally for him and that an appalling misunderstanding had been the only cause of their separation? Yes, suppose that was the case? Guccio knew he would yield at once, would forget his wrongs as soon as he had given them expression and would take Marie de Cressay back to Siena, to the family palace on the Piazza Tolomei, to show his beautiful wife off to his fellow-citizens. And he would show Marie the new city, which was smaller than Paris or London of course, but could rival them in beauty, with its Municipio only recently completed, of which the great Simone Martini was at this very moment finishing the interior, and with its black and white cathedral which would be the most beautiful in Tuscany, once its façade was done. Oh, the joys of sharing what one loved with a beloved wife! But what was he doing dreaming in front of a tin mirror, when he ought to be hurrying to Cressay and turning her surprise to his advantage?

  But then he began to think. The bitterness he had nursed for nine years could not be forgotten all at once, nor indeed the fear that had driven him from this very garden. In the first place, it was his son he wanted above all. Perhaps he had better send the sergeant-at-arms down with the Count de Bouville’s letter; the demand would carry more weight. And then, after nine years, was Marie still as beautiful? Would he still be as proud of appearing with her on his arm?

  Guccio believed he had now attained to maturity, reached the age at which one acted from reason. Yet, even if there was now a line between his eyebrows, he was still the same man, the same mixture of cunning and ingenuousness, pride and romantic dreams. For in truth the years have little effect on our nature and age does not free us of our faults. We lose our hair more quickly than our weaknesses.

  She had dreamed of its happening for nine years, hoped for it, feared it, prayed God each day to bring it about and prayed the Virgin to spare it her; evening after evening, morning after morning, she had prepared what she would say if it occurred, she had murmured to herself every answer she could think of to all the questions she could imagine; she had thought of a hundred, a thousand ways in which it might come about. It had come about. And now she did not know how to meet the situation.

  For that morning Marie de Cressay’s maid, who in the old days had been the confidante of her happiness and her tragedy, came to her room and whispered to her that Guccio Baglioni was back. He had been seen to arrive in the village of Neauphle; he had the retinue of a lord and several of the King’s sergeants as his escort; he seemed to be a messenger from the Pope. This was the popular gossip which, as it so often does, bore some relation to the truth, because a single detail had awakened local curiosity: the urchins in the market-square had stared open-mouthed at the yellow leather harness embroidered with the keys of Saint Peter, which was indeed a present from the Pope to his banker’s nephew, and that harness had set the whole village speculating.

  And now the maid stood there breathless, her eyes bright with emotion and her cheeks red. Marie de Cressay had no idea what she ought or indeed would do.

  She said: ‘Give me my dress.’

  She said it at once and without thinking, but the maid understood. For Marie had very few dresses, and the dress she was asking for could only be the one that had been made long ago out of the beautiful piece of silk Guccio had brought her as a present. Every week it was taken out of the chest, carefully brushed, ironed, aired, sometimes wept over, and never worn.

  Guccio might appear at any moment. Had the maid seen him? No. She was merely repeating the gossip which was going from house to house. Perhaps he was already on the way! If Marie had only had a whole day in which to prepare for his arrival. She had had nine years, but they were all reduced now to a single instant.

  What did it matter that the water was cold with which she washed her breast, stomach and arms, while the servant turned away, surprised at her mistress’s sudden immodesty, though she could not resist a glance at the beautiful body which had been deprived so pitifully of a man for so long. She could not help being a little jealous at seeing how full and firm it had remained, like a fine plant in the sun, though the breasts were heavier than in the old days and sagged a little on to the chest, the thighs were not quite so smooth, and maternity had marked the stomach with a few small lines. So the bodies of noble girls spoiled too. Less than those of servants, of course. But they spoiled nevertheless, and it was God’s justice in making all His creatures the same.

  Marie had difficulty getting into her dress. Had the material shrunk from being unused so long, or had Marie grown stouter? It was more perhaps that the shape of her body had altered, as if the curves and contours were no longer in the same places. She had changed. She knew that the fair down was thicker on her lip, and that the freckles, due to her open-air life in the fields, had spread over her face. Her hair, that mass of golden hair whose braids must be so hurriedly plaited, was neither as soft nor as gleaming as it once had been.

  But now Marie had donned her party dress, which was a bit tight at the armholes; and her hands, reddened by housework, emerged from the green silk sleeves, empty hands, empty of all the nine years that had suddenly been abolished.

  What had she done with all those years that now seemed but a sigh of time?

  She had lived on her memories. She had drawn daily nourishment from those few months of love and happiness, as if from a harvest that had been too quickly garnered. She had crushed each moment of that past in the mill of her memory. A thousand times over she had seen the young Lombard come to claim his debt and drive away the wicked Provost, caught his first glance, and relived their first walk together. A thousand times over she had repeated her vow in the dark, silent chapel before the unknown monk. A thousand times over she had discovered her pregnancy. A thousand times over she had been dragged violently from the convent in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and taken in a closed litter, clasping her new-born child to her breast, to the royal Castle of Vince
nnes. A thousand times over she had seen her child dressed in the royal swaddling clothes, and then brought back to her dead. And it was still a dagger in her heart. And she still hated the Countess de Bouville even though she was dead, and she hoped she was suffering all the torments of Hell. A thousand times over she had been made to swear on the Bible to keep the little King of France, not to reveal the terrible secrets of the Court even in the confessional, and never to see Guccio again. And a thousand times over she had asked herself: ‘Why should this have happened to me?’

  She had asked it of the great dumb blue sky of August days, of the winter nights she spent shivering alone between coarse sheets, of the hopeless dawns, and of the evenings of eventless days. Why?

  She had asked it of the linen she counted for the laundry, of the sauces she stirred on the kitchen fire, of the meat she put in the salting-tub, and of the stream that ran below the manor, on whose banks the people picked jonquils and irises on the mornings of religious processions.

  At moments she had hated Guccio, hated him for existing and for having passed through her life like a tempestuous wind through a house with open doors; and then she had immediately reproached herself for the thought as if it were a blasphemy.

  In turn she had looked on herself as a great sinner on whom the Almighty had imposed this perpetual expiation, as a martyr, as a sort of saint expressly designated by the Divine Will to save the Crown of France, Saint Louis’s succession and the whole realm in the person of this little child who had been confided to her care. And it was like this that you could go mad, little by little, without those about you being aware of it.

  She had only occasionally heard news of the one man she had ever loved, of her husband whom no one would recognize as such, and then only from a few words dropped by the employee at the bank to her maid. Guccio was alive. That was all she knew. How she suffered from imagining him, or rather being unable to imagine him, in a distant country, in a strange town, and to think that perhaps he had married again. The Lombards had no such great respect for a vow as all that. And now Guccio was only a quarter of a league away. But had he really come back for her sake? Or merely to deal with some matter at the bank? That would be the most terrible thing of all: that he should be so near and not for her sake. But could she blame him even for this, since it was she herself who had refused to see him nine years ago, so harshly told him he must never see her again, and without being able to reveal the reason for her cruelty. And suddenly she cried, ‘The child!’

  For Guccio would want to see the little boy he believed his. It must surely be for that he had come?

  Jeannot was out in the meadow – she could see it from the window – down by the Mauldre, the stream which was bordered with yellow irises and too shallow for there to be any danger of his drowning, playing with the groom’s youngest son, the wheelwright’s two boys and the miller’s daughter, who was round as a ball. He had mud on his knees and face, and even in the lock of fair hair that lay in a curl across his forehead. He had strong, rosy legs and was shouting at the top of his voice. People thought him a little bastard, a child of sin, and treated him as such.

  But why did not Marie’s brothers, the peasants on the estate and the people of Neauphle see that Jeannot had nothing of that golden, almost auburn fairness that was his mother’s and less still of Guccio’s dark, almost gingerbread complexion? How could they fail to notice that he was a real little Capet, with his broad face, pale blue eyes set a little too far apart, his chin that would grow strong, and his straw-like fairness? King Philip the Fair was his grandfather. It was extraordinary how people shut their eyes so firmly to everything but the preconceived ideas they had of people and of things.

  When Marie had suggested to her brothers that Jeannot should be sent to the monks of a neighbouring Augustinian monastery to be taught to write, they had merely shrugged their shoulders.

  ‘We can read a little and it’s not much good to us. We can’t write and it wouldn’t be any use to us if we could,’ the eldest replied. ‘Why do you want Jeannot to know more than we do? It’s all very well for priests to study, but you can’t even make him a priest since he’s a bastard.’

  Down among the irises in the meadow the child was sulkily following the servant who had been sent to fetch him. With a pole in his hand, he had been playing at being a knight, and had almost broken through the defences of a shed where wicked men were holding the miller’s daughter prisoner.

  And at this moment Marie’s brothers, Jeannot’s uncles, though they did not know they were only false uncles, came in from inspecting their fields. They were dusty, smelt of horses’ sweat and their nails were black. Pierre, the elder, was already like what his father had been; his stomach bulged over his belt, his beard was shaggy, his teeth rotten and the two eye-teeth missing. He was hoping for a war in which he could make his name; and whenever he heard talk of England or the Empire, he would declare that the King had only to raise an army and everyone would see what the chivalry could do. He had not, however, been dubbed knight; but he might perhaps become one in the course of a campaign. His only experience of war had been in Louis Hutin’s Muddy Host, for he had not been summoned to the expedition into Aquitaine. He had had a moment of hope on learning of Monseigneur Charles of Valois’s proposed crusade; but then Monseigneur Charles had died. Oh, that was the baron God should have given them for king!

  Jean de Cressay, the younger, was both thinner and paler, but paid no greater attention to his appearance. His life was a mixture of indifference and routine. Neither of them had married. Their sister had kept house for them since the death of their mother, Dame Eliabel; and they had thus someone to look after the kitchen and the linen, and someone, too, with whom they could lose their temper from time to time, and more easily indeed than they would have dared to do with a wife. Should their breeches have a tear in them, they could always blame Marie for the fact that they had been unable to find suitable wives because of the shame she had brought on the family.

  Nevertheless, they lived in modest ease thanks to the pension that Count de Bouville regularly sent their sister on the pretext that she had been a royal wet-nurse, and thanks also to the presents in kind the banker Tolomei continued sending the child he believed to be his great-nephew. Marie’s sin had therefore been of considerable advantage to the two brothers.

  Jean knew a widow in Montfort-l’Amaury and visited her from time to time; and on those days he dressed himself up with a rather guilty air. Pierre preferred to hunt his own land, and felt himself quite a seigneur, and at little cost, because a number of children in the neighbouring villages had already begun to resemble him. But what did honour to a son of the nobility was dishonourable in a daughter of the nobility; this was an accepted fact, which was not open to discussion.

  Pierre and Jean were much surprised to find their sister wearing her silk dress and Jeannot stamping with rage because he was being washed. Was it by any chance a feast day they had forgotten?

  ‘Guccio is in Neauphle,’ Marie said.

  And she took a hasty step backwards, because Pierre was quite capable of slapping her face.

  But Pierre did nothing. He merely stared at Marie. And Jean did the same. They both stood there, their arms dangling, like men whose minds were incapable of grasping the unexpected. Guccio had come back. It was an important piece of news and it took them several minutes to absorb it. What new problems was it likely to create? They had to admit they had liked Guccio very well, when he had been their hunting companion and had brought them hawks from Milan; but this was before they had realized the fellow was making love to their sister practically under their noses. Then, when Dame Eliabel had discovered that her daughter was sinfully pregnant, they had wanted to kill him. But they had regretted their violence when they had visited the banker Tolomei in his house in Paris, and had realized, too late, that if their sister married a rich Lombard it would be less of a dishonour than to keep her at home as the mother of a fatherless child.

  Ho
wever, they had little time to consider the news, for the sergeant-at-arms, in the livery of the Count de Bouville, trotting along on a great bay horse, and wearing a coat of blue cloth scalloped about the thighs, rode in to the manor’s courtyard, which was at once crowded with astonished onlookers. The peasants doffed their caps; children’s heads appeared in the doorways; the women wiped their hands on their aprons.

  The sergeant had come to deliver two messages to the Sire Pierre, one from Guccio and the other from the Count de Bouville himself. Pierre de Cressay assumed the important and haughty expression of a man receiving a letter. He frowned, pursed his lips behind his beard and loudly ordered that the messenger should be given to eat and drink, just as if he had ridden fifteen leagues. Then he went aside with his brother to read the letters. And, indeed, the two of them were not too many. They had even to summon Marie, who was more skilled in interpreting the letters of the alphabet.

  And Marie began to tremble, tremble, tremble.

  ‘We cannot understand it, Messire. Our sister began trembling as if Satan himself had appeared before her. And she utterly refused to see you. Then she burst into tears.’

  The two Cressay brothers were much embarrassed. They had had their boots cleaned, and Jean had donned the tunic he normally wore only when visiting his widow in Montfort. They were standing looking abashed and rather uncertain of themselves in the back room of the branch bank of Neauphle, while Guccio contemplated them rather sourly and did not even ask them to sit down.

  Two hours before, when they had received the letters, they had imagined they could do good business over their sister’s departure and the recognition of her marriage. A thousand livres cash down was what they intended asking. A Lombard could well afford that much. But Marie had destroyed their hopes by her strange attitude and her determination not to see Guccio.