Death and the Lady Read Online Free PDF

Adele,” said Mère Adele, “and this is Jeannette
Laclos of Sency. You are Giscard de Montsalvat from the other side of Normandy,
and you say you have a claim on our guest?”
    That took him properly aback. He was not used to such
directness, maybe, in the courts that he had come from. But he had a quick wit,
and a smooth tongue to go with it. “My claim is no more than I have said. She
was my brother’s lover. She carries his child. He wished to acknowledge it; he
bound me before he died, to do all that I could on its behalf.”
    “For bastard seed?” asked Mère Adele. “I should think you’d
be glad to see the last of her. Wasn’t your brother the elder? And wouldn’t her
baby be his heir, if it were male, and she a wife?”
    “She would never marry him,” said Messire Giscard. “She was
noble enough, she said, but exiled, and no dowry to her name.”
    “Then all the more cause for you to let her go. Why do you
hunt her down? She’s no thief, you say. What does she have that you want?”
    He looked at his feet in their fine soft shoes. He was out
of his reckoning, maybe.
      My stomach drew
tight as I watched him. Men like that—big beautiful animals who had never known
a moment’s thirst or hunger except what they themselves chose, in war or in the
chase; who had never been crossed, nor knew what to do when they were—such men
were dangerous. One of them had met me in the wood before I married Claudel;
and so Celine was a fair child, like the Norman who had sired her. A Norman very
like this one, only not so pretty to look at. He had been gentle in his way.
But he wanted me, and what he wanted, he took. He never asked my name. I never
asked his.
    This one had asked. It softened me-more than I liked to
admit. Of course he did not care. He wanted to know his adversaries, that was
all. If it had been the two of us under the trees and the blood rising in him,
names would not have mattered.
    Lys spoke, making me start; I was deep in myself. “He wants
me,” she said. “Somewhat for my beauty. More for what he thinks that I will
give. “
    Messire Giscard smiled his easy smile. “So then, you tempt
me. I’d hardly sin so far as to lust after my brother’s woman. That is incest,
and forbidden by holy Church.” He crossed himself devoutly. “No, Mère Adele;
beautiful she may be, but I swore a vow to my brother.”
    “You promised to let me go,” said Lys.
    “Poor lady,” he said. “You were beside yourself with grief.
What could I do but say yes to anything you said? I beg your pardon for the
falsehood; I reckoned, truly, that it was needful. I never meant to cast you
out.
    “You never meant to set me free.”
    “Do you hate him that much?” asked Mère Adele.
    Lys looked at her, and then at him. He was still smiling.
Pretty: oh, so pretty, with the sun aslant on his bright hair, and his white
teeth gleaming.
    “Aymeric was never so fair,” said Lys. “That was all given
to his brother. He was a little frog-mouthed bandy-legged man, as swarthy as a
Saracen, bad eyes and bad teeth and nothing about him that was beautiful. Except,”
she said, “he was. He would come into a room, and one would think, ‘What an
ugly little man!’ Then he would smile, and nothing in the world would matter,
except that he was happy. Everyone loved him. Even his enemies—they hated him
with sincere respect, and admired him profoundly. I was his enemy, in the
beginning. I was a hard proud cruel thing, exile by free choice from my own
country, sworn to make my way in the world, myself alone and with no other. He—he
wanted to protect me. ‘You are a woman,’ he said. As if that was all the reason
he needed.
    “I hated him for that: He was so certain, and so
insufferable, mere mortal man before all that I was and had been. But he would
not yield for aught that I could do, and in the end, like all the rest, I fell under
his spell.”
    “Or he under yours,” said Messire Giscard. “From the moment
he saw you,