“You don’t have much trouble with women, do you?”
“I like women. I like everything about them, sometimes even their perverseness.” He remembered Marie Louvet—he still refused to call her his wife—and sighed in melancholy fashion.
Her laughter rang out. “My name is Simone. What’s yours?”
“Jean. The Bastard.”
“You make it sound like a title.”
“It’s better than being ashamed of it.”
She considered him steadily while swaying to the rhythmic walking of her horse. “You know, I think you like being a bastard. It gives you a feeling of being put upon, an excuse for failure, as it were.”
He reached for her wrist so suddenly that she was dragged halfway out of her saddle before she knew what he was doing. The horses came to a stop, the gelding shaking its ringbits with up and down motions of its head. The blonde woman lay with a shoulder crushed to his chest, one foot completely out of the stirrup. If his arm released her, she would fall onto the road.
And yet she knew no fear. This young man was angry, but it was a controlled anger. He said to her blonde head, looking down at it, “I never fail. You understand? Jean le Bâtard never fails!”
“I was only testing you, seigneur.”
“Don’t call me seigneur.”
“Jean, then.”
“There’s straw in your hair. We’ll stop at the next brook and you can clean it.”
He lifted her back into her saddle and smiled. As if the touch of her body had struck some psychic spark inside him, he looked at her with the eyes of a man who finds a beautiful woman before him. Simone preened herself, letting the brown wool outline her heavy breasts, the curves of her solid thighs. A lone woman needed a protector in these lawless times, and Simone knew only one way to acquire one.
They moved on for another hundred yards; then Jean asked, “Testing me for what?”
“To see if there’s a fire inside your rib case. I think there is. I have an offer to make such a man.”
“Go on.”
“In the tiny village of Neufchâteau there lives an old soldier named Thibaud. He has an idea for a new weapon he calls a cannon.”
Jean hooted. “A cannon? The Black Prince used cannon against Calais nearly a hundred years ago, when Edward the Third invaded the north countries!”
“I know nothing about that. All I know is that he claims it’s new. It has something to do with the cannonball itself, I think.”
He pondered that, riding through the dust of early afternoon. He would like to believe the blonde woman, but common sense told him there was no merit in the idea. A new type of cannonball? One made of wood or glass instead of iron? It would serve no purpose. The idea was ridiculous.
And yet—
Sometimes a man had to snatch at straws so that he might bring victory from despair, strengthening them with the fiber of his will and his own strength as straw itself is mixed with clay and sand to give bricks greater cohesion. And nowhere in all France, he thought, was there a man more despairing than himself.
“How far is this Neufchâteau?”
“A score of leagues away, near the River Meuse.”
“This man could be dead by now.”
Simone looked willful. “He may. I haven’t seen him for five or six years. But if you mean what you say—that you’re a soldier and need some fancy new weapon to fight Englishmen and Burgundians—I should think you’d want to make the trip.”
“I also want to kill the men who murdered my father.”
“Now there I cannot help you.”
Jean grinned wolfishly. “Maybe you can, at that.”
She asked questions, but he would say nothing until they reined in on the bank of a small stream that twisted through the ploughland country to meet the Oise near Creil. Beech trees grew all around, forming a little glade. Where the banks of the brook sloped downward, a wide plat of blue gentians bloomed in woodland splendor.
“We’ll eat here from the food you put in the saddlebags,” he told her, reaching up his arms to help her off the horse.
He watched her walk with swaying hips toward the brook, long hair flowing down her back. She knelt and bent her head, letting the water take the golden strands. Her hands moved in the stream, washing out the burrs and bits of straw. When she was done she put her head to one side, hands wringing the water from her thick hair, kneeling in graceful indolence and smiling up at him.
“There are cold turnips in the bag, and cheese with bread and some fruit,” she told him. “Or do you want me to fetch it?”
Jean stirred himself, remembering his role of gentleman adventurer. It was hard to play at being two men, for he was so used to being waited on by servants he forgot that a commoner had no one to fetch and carry for him. With a grin he went and lifted down the saddlebags, and brought them to her.
Her yellow hair was spread fanlike across her back and shoulders. It glinted in the sunlight as if spun from faery gold, framing her slant gray eyes and ripe red mouth. Sitting beside her, he let her break the manchet loaf and pass half to him with a wedge of homemade cheese.
“If you’re what you say you are,” she murmured, “and your father was a duke, why are you dressed like an ordinary soldier?”
He saw that disbelief was strong in her. Impishness made him lift the leather aumonière at his belt, open it and shake out the livres tournois in a golden shower. Simone sat up straighter, crying out in awe. When he caught the signet ring set with the nettles of Orleans, she took it in her hand and regarded him steadily.
“You might have stolen it.”
“I didn’t. My father gave it to me.”
“The duke?”
“Louis of Orleans.”
She bent forward with laughter so infectious that he joined in her merriment. When she could talk, she wiped tears of mirth from her cheeks with the back of a hand and said, “You aim high, in God’s name! Louis of Orleans? Why—that makes you cousin to the Dauphin!”
“The Dauphin made me Seigneur of Vaubernais and one of his counselors. A little later he named me Grand Chamberlain of France.”
“Fou!” You’re mad, utterly mad!” Her eyes went to the ring as she turned it over and over. “If you’re all these things, why are you here?”
“To kill my father’s murderers. I quarreled with Arthur de Richemont, who is Constable of France. I had my belly full of court life. I wanted to get away from it.”
And from Marie Louvet who became your wife in name only, Jean? To escape the witchery of her dark eyes and red mouth, the mere sight of which always caused an agonizing pain to stab your heart?
He said thoughtfully, “In a way, I think I was looking for death. Perhaps I hoped one of the men who killed my father would kill me, too. None has, so far. Within the week I’ll give another of them the chance.”
“I almost believe you,” she said, handing back the ring, lifting the leather pouch and filling it with the golden coins.
“Étienne Aymon lives in a small manor house near Montmirail, which is not so far from here we could not