In the Company of Fools by Tania Bayard

Author:Tania Bayard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448303823
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2019-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

Take as many frogs as you can get and hang them upside down on spits driven from their mouths to their anuses. Have a lead vessel for collecting the oil that comes out of their mouths. Save this oil, because it is a deadly poison that harms and kills.

Picatrix, ninth-century Arabic book on magic, translated into Spanish and Latin in 1256

Marion left, and Christine went into the duke’s residence to continue her work. As she passed the chamber where Valentina received visitors, she heard music and looked in to see the duke and duchess and their courtiers listening to a minstrel. Valentina motioned for her to come in.

The duchess, dressed in her customary plain, unadorned gown, sat on a high-backed chair, looking like a delicate lily next to her ladies-in-waiting in their elaborate houppelandes and huge padded headdresses glittering with rubies and emeralds. Her two maids, Julia and Elena, looked similarly unassuming, except for Julia’s open-necked gown.

The duke leaned against a wall, twirling a walking stick and watching Mariette. She kept her head down, but Christine could tell she was aware of Louis’s every move. Eustache Deschamps, standing beside the duke, looked at Mariette’s gold-trimmed red and blue houppelande with its tight waist and revealing neckline, and frowned. He wore a beaver hat so large that it covered his head almost down to his eyes. Christine knew he was embarrassed about going bald and had special permission to keep his hat on in the duke’s presence. She wondered whether the duke himself felt any embarrassment about the fact that he was also losing his hair.

The duke’s fools loitered in the background – Hanotin cradling his sleeping monkey in his arms, Blondel lying on the floor with Coquinet and Giliot standing over him, tapping his stomach gently with their feet in time to the music, and Fripon standing nearby with his arms folded across his chest and a smirk on his face as he watched the duke and Mariette.

There were many musicians at the Orléans court, but this one, whom Christine hadn’t seen before, was especially colorful. He wore an olive-green knee-length surcoat and bright red leggings, and had a tall yellow hat that he’d set on the floor at his feet. His long fingers flew over the strings of his lute as he sang a lai about a nobleman and his mistress, his high, sweet voice seeming to float around the room. Every time he came to a passage about the pleasures of love, Mariette raised her eyes and smiled slyly at Louis, and Eustache’s frown became more pronounced. Madame de Maucouvent held Valentina’s little son Charles and turned his head so he couldn’t see what his father was doing, and the duchess’s other ladies shuffled their feet and shook their heads disapprovingly. The queen’s lady-in-waiting, Symonne du Mesnil, was there, too, and she watched the duke with a mocking smile on her face.

When he wasn’t frowning at the duke and Mariette, Eustache hummed along with the music and nodded to the minstrel, who seemed to be a friend of his.

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