The Lily and the Lion by Maurice Druon

Author:Maurice Druon [Maurice Druon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-08-20T22:00:00+00:00

4.

A Bad Day

FROM THE WINDOWS OF Bonnefille House Beatrice d’Hirson was watching the rain fall in the Rue Mauconseil. She had been waiting for some hours past for Robert of Artois, who had promised to come that afternoon. But Robert never kept his promises, either in small things or in great, and Beatrice was beginning to think that she was very silly to believe in him.

To a woman waiting for a man, he has every fault. Had not Robert promised, and for nearly a year now, that she would be a lady-in-waiting in his household? At bottom he was much like his aunt; all the Artois were alike. An ungrateful lot! You worked yourself to death in their service, running after suppliers of poisons and casters of spells, committed murder to serve their interests, ran the risk of the gallows or the stake – and all for what? It was certainly not Monseigneur Robert who would have been arrested had Beatrice been caught putting arsenic into Madame Mahaut’s medicines, or salts of mercury into the Dowager Queen Jeanne’s wine. ‘I don’t know the woman!’ he would have said. ‘Does she dare maintain she was acting on my orders? It’s a lie. She was a member of my aunt’s household, not of mine. She’s obviously saying it to save herself. Send her to the wheel.’ And who would hesitate between the word of a peer of France, the King’s brother-in-law, and that of an obscure bishop’s niece, whose family was no longer even in favour?

‘And what have I done it all for?’ Beatrice thought. ‘Simply in order to wait all alone in my house, to which Monseigneur Robert deigns to pay a visit once a week! He said he would come after vespers; and benediction has already rung. No doubt he’s carousing somewhere with a couple of barons he’s invited to dinner, and talking of his great exploits, the affairs of the kingdom and his lawsuit, while pinching the maidservants’ bottoms. Even La Divion eats at his table now, I hear! And here am I, staring out at the rain. He’ll come in late at night, heavy, belching and red in the face; he’ll talk nonsense for a moment, collapse on the bed, sleep an hour and leave again. If he comes at all, that is!’

Beatrice was bored, even more than she had been at Conflans during Mahaut’s last months. Her affair with Robert was stuck in a bog. She had thought to trap the giant, but it was he who had won the day. Humiliated and unsatisfied, her passion was beginning to change into secret resentment. She seemed always to be waiting for him! Nor could she go out and do a round of the taverns with a friend in search of adventure, because Robert was certain to come when she was out. Besides, he had her watched.

She was well aware that Robert had cooled towards her, and looked on her now merely as an obligation, an accomplice who had to be humoured.

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