Joanna (17 page)

Salisbury stared stonily at the ground. Neither alternative John offered was worth considering for a moment. Geoffrey would never agree to either. He would sooner die or withdraw his force than yield their leadership to another man; he might yield his own small contingent to Salisbury himself, if urged, but he would never allow control of Ian’s men to slip from his hands. That was his trust. As for the othertaking his pack animals and supplieshe would want to know why and, when he heard, would point out, quite correctly, that young or old, he had been more right than any other in his estimate of the Welsh and was thus best fitted for the mission. In fact, Salisbury knew John’s idea was good and Geoffrey was able. Choking down his fear for his son, Salisbury agreed.

Lady Alinor had, of course, warned her daughter of the dangers inherent in court life and Joanna was not totally ignorant of it because she had spent time at court under Lady Ela’s care. She discovered, however, that there are great differences between childhood at court and young maidenhood there. As a child, Joanna had enjoyed herself. It was the only time, aside from high festivals like her mother’s second wedding, that she had had a wide variety of playmates of her own age and class. Some of those playmates were still there and they had greeted her kindly, but Joanna found that they had grown apart.   Under ordinary circumstances, such as the gathering of the court for Christmas or Easter or even a special convocation for political purposes, Joanna would have met a substantial group of women with tastes and interests much like her own. Not many would have been mistresses of their own property, like Joanna, but, as deputies for their husbands, they too would have sat in justice and overseen the workings of the keep and demesne. With such women, Joanna would have had much in common. Unfortunately, at a time when their husbands* were summoned to war, those ladies were where Joanna had expected to beat home, minding their lands. All that remained in Isabella’s court were the permanent members of her suite, girls in training, women in various ways dependent upon the queen, or girls who were wards of the king awaiting his choice of husband. To “protect” them, certain gentlemen were excused from the war in Wales and left to attend upon the queen also.

For the women permanently attached to her, Isabella set the tone completely. Talk and interest centered solely upon appearance and the clothing and jewels that set off a woman’s appearance or on scandalwho was linked to whom, for how long, and where they next would stray. Joanna was by no means uninterested in such subjects. If she was less vain than her beauty could have made her, she was nonetheless aware of it and took pleasure in increasing it in any way she could. Nor did she lack a lively interest in the intrigues of the court. The trouble was that these discussions soon grew too personal. Remarks that were at first incomprehensible were soon made all too clear by meaningful nods and titters. One of the men the women discussed frequently was Geoffrey.

Joanna was saved from making a fool of herself by three things. The first was simply that the man Isabella’s ladies described was so totally different from the Geoffrey that Joanna knew that it took an abnormally long time for her to make the connection. In fact, in the beginning she was quite bewildered, believing that she was either being warned against some high-powered seducer or, more likely, being slyly induced to fall victim to him. When she understood at   last, her immediate reaction was laughter. It was ridiculous that these bejeweled and scented and even painted ladies of wide experience should be sighing and spitting over Geoffrey in this way.

Fortunately, it was not until Joanna was alone and really had time to consider all the aspects of what she heard that a second wave of emotion rolled over her. It was only when she was lying in bed that she felt again the warmth of Geoffrey’s mouth and the cravings awakened by the sure touch of his hands. Then it did not seem so funny that he should be able to arouse such feelings in others. Rage and spite roiled in her; tears rose in her eyes and hot words came to her lips. She hissed like an angry snake, so that Brian leapt to his feet from where he lay beside the bed and rumbled growls. Hushing him, Joanna had time to think of what she had muttered beneath her breath. The words were horribly familiar. More than once she had heard her mother fling them at her stepfather.

Whether or not Ian was guiltyand Joanna did not think he was, being better able than her jealous mother to judge the mingled bewilderment, exasperation, and amusement with which he defended himselfwas not the point. The quarrels never reached into the past. Alinor did not blame Ian for love affairs engaged in before they were married. Calm returned to Joanna. It did not matter whose bed Geoffrey had warmed before they were betrothed; how could he be faithful to her when he never knew or expected to be her husband? Sure as fate, he had warmed no woman, except perhaps a casual whore, since then because Joanna knew where he had been and what he had been doing every day after the betrothal. The clincher made her smile. If Geoffrey were still involved with one of these court bitches, he would not have ridden two hundred miles to Roselynde when a letter could have given him ten more days in his mistress’s bed.

Contentment restored, Joanna snuggled down into her bed and closed her eyes, which promptly opened again on a double thought. The first part of it smelled suspiciously like bad cheese set out to trap a rat. Mistresses eager to keep a   man’s devotion do not blazon his infidelity to his wife’s face. Such stupidity breeds quarrels that make a man unhappy, and a wife has an edge in such a contest. Only a mistress very, very sure of her hold on her love might spitefully so bait a wife. But none of those women had fast hold on Geoffrey nor pretended to have. They talked of him as if he sprang from bed to bed with the agility of an acrobat and the slipperiness of an eel. Their purpose, then, could only be that she
should
know of his affairsbut why? A single jealous woman might wish to make her unhappy out of spite, but none of these women even pretended to be heart-touched, most of them obviously
liked
Geoffrey, and some of them even seemed to like
her
.

The answer had to be that they did Isabella’s will. Only the queen had the power to produce such unanimity of action. Joanna turned flat on her back, staring upward into the gathering point of her bed curtains. After a moment she shook her head. She did not blame Isabella’s ladies, not even those who were friendly to her. It was all a joke to them; they did not conceive that it was wrong. And Isabella was an idiot! For some reason, the woman had hated Geoffrey ever since he was a child and doubtless this was one more attempt to make
him
unhappy. Isabella thinks to make me hate him for what he did before he was mine, Joanna realized, and perhaps she even hopes to turn me into a whore to spite him.

That made Joanna grina smile that would have made her betrothed very uneasy if he had seen it. Now he is mine, Joanna thought, I had sooner tame him, even if I must geld him to do it, than to spite him by soiling myself. And then she laughed softly. Thinking back on her mother’s furious accusations and Ian’s anguished protests made Joanna very sure Geoffrey did not look elsewhere just now. Nonetheless, when Lady Ela arrived a week later, Joanna flew to her arms as to a haven.

‘‘I see the long tongues have been wagging already,” Lady Ela said as soon as they were able to find a corner in which to be private.

“I do not believe them,” Joanna flashed passionately.   Eyes paler than her own but as bright as hers in a rage stared at Joanna. “What do you mean?” Ela asked sharply. “Do you mean you do not believe Geoffrey has ever mounted a mistress? I assure you he has before and may again.”

“What he has done in the past is no business of mine,” Joanna said softly, “and he may futter a whore in a ditch if I am not by and that is his need, but he will mount no mistress while I am his wife. He is mine!”

Lady Ela clapped her hands to her ears. “Is it Joanna I hear or Alinor?” she asked laughing. Then she said seriously, “I see what you mean, but you need not worry even about the past if what you fear is that Geoffrey’s heart was touched. If you can win it, he will bring that to you as clean as your own.”

To that, Joanna made no answer. Stricken by the knowledge that she did not wish to give her heart into Geoffrey’s keeping, it did not seem right for her to demand his. Nor would she permit herself to examine why, if she did not want love, she was so set against Geoffrey’s loving elsewhere. She could not say that to Ela, of course, and she shook her head.

“That is not really what troubles me,” she said half truthfully. “What frets me beyond bearing is that I am helpless to stop their tongues. I could do it by changing the look of their faces with my hands, but Ian said I must not and, in truth, the blame is not all theirs. I believe the queen is behind it”

“I believe it too, but do not say it aloud again,” Ela interrupted. Then her lips twitched and her hands began to flutter. “It is so dark in here,” she whined. “I am afflicted with a shadowing of the eyes from lack of light. It is damp. My chest feels a tightness.”

“Dear madam,” Joanna exclaimed immediately upon her cue, “lean here upon my arm. I will lead you into the garden where there is more light and the air is warm.”

“I am not sure I can go so far,” Ela whimpered.

A tiny hesitation was all the sign Joanna gave of her impulse to break into giggles. Obviously, Lady Ela had not really cared whether anyone heard what they said about Geoffrey. It was natural that Joanna should carry that trouble to her foster mother at once. Now, however, Ela wanted to impart information that needed secrecy.

“I am very strong,” Joanna urged. “I will support you, and you may lean on the other side on Brian. Up, you fool,” she said to the dog.

Thus, they tottered down the stairs and out into the open. Once outside, Lady Ela said with an air of pleased surprise that she could breathe more easily. Then she added, like a martyr who finds that the arrows piercing her do not hurt, that she believed she could walk a few steps. And between sighs of exhaustion and high-pitched exclamations on the fragility of her health, she imparted a few luscious pieces of scandal and a few comments that had been made about the queen by her ladies that should serve to silence certain tongues. Moreover, Lady Ela had her own methods of dealing with Isabella and she was able, temporarily at least, to divert the queen’s shallow mind from Joanna.

As the queen lost interest and the ladies saw Ela’s strong support backing Joannanone could really doubt where the tidbits came from that Joanna smilingly related in private and wordlessly threatened to make publicmost attempts to bait the girl died. Talk fell into a more impersonal vein in her presence. There was gossip of course, but most of the time it was the mechanics of entrapping male attention that absorbed the ladies.

In a relatively short time, such distractions began to pall on Joanna. There are only so many places to pin a brooch, only so many positions to place an armlet, only so many lengths to hang a necklet. Joanna was an exquisite needlewoman, but new stitches were not the be-all and end-all of her existence, no matter how beautiful the patterns they produced. She began to hunger after more solid substance for her days. She began to meet the enemy her mother had warned her against most specificallyennui.

Joanna had mostly discounted those warnings. She suspected Lady Alinor’s discontent was a result of her own impatient nature that must be up and doing at every moment. Joanna knew that she, herselfred hair or no red hairwas much slower in action, more content to watch and dream. In moments of total exasperation, her mother had occasionally called her a beautiful cow, but that was not true. Cows, as far as anyone can tell, can exist with perfectly blank minds, ruminating only on the contents of their several stomachs. Joanna, who was also willing to ruminate, needed something more interesting to contemplate.

The first path her thoughts found led, naturally enough, to Geoffrey. For some reason, a frequent mental repetition of the events of their parting did not bore Joanna at all. Unfortunately, the pattern of thought did not end there. After parting came the future, and, for Geoffrey, the future was war. Mostly, Joanna wondered how he was managing the men and how the supplies were holding out. Once in a while, however, she thought of battle, and then a panic seized upon her and shook her as a terrier shakes a rat. She fought off the fear, trying to smother it, trying to run away from it, trying to soothe herself with assurances that Geoffrey was only one young man out of many, many young men all equally personable.

That assurance, strangely enough, seemed to increase rather than subdue the fear. In desperation, Joanna did her best to put Geoffrey out of her mind entirely. There was no dearth of men at court, even though so many had ridden with the king. There were the older men, like Oxford, who wished to be near the scene of action although they were no longer physically involved. There were those who were charged with the routine of government, who remained in a safe place that was still conveniently close to transmit necessary information to the king, and there were the queen’s gentlemen who were responsible for her safety and that of her children. Joanna flirted with them all.

In a sense, she was careful. She never moved far from Lady Ela, except to dance. She never danced more than   once in an evening with any gentleman (except those old enough to be her grandfather), sitting out rather than seeming to show favor to anyone. Her conversation was absolutely unimpeachable; she spoke by preference of national affairs or trade, or, if that was impossible, of hunting or other sport. It was impossible, the gentlemen discovered, to sigh a love lyric to Joanna; it was also impossible to catch her alone to do so. Had that been the total sum of her behavior, Joanna would soon have found herself bereft of young male company in spite of the lure of her lovely features and ripe body. What kept Joanna’s court around her was an indefinable hint of promise. Something in her eyes said, “I am not really good, I am only careful and fearful. Catch me at the right time, and I will yield.”