The Sixth Surrender

In the loft above the stables, where she had retreated from the rain, Juliana set down her egg basket, sat on the hay pile, and hugged her knees. A week had passed. The sun rose, the birds chirped, rains came and went, and everyone carried on, oblivious to the monumental event that Sister Eustace had surrendered her maidenhood to her own dissolute husband—and at her own instigation.

Since then, she had walked around Rivefort in a fog and would burst into tears when no one was about. It had to stop. Nothing that had happened to her would have been any different under any other man. She had to do it only once. Just let him try to put her aside now.

She had not seen him since that day. She wished she could say that he avoided her for chivalrous reasons, but that was far from the truth. According to bailey gossip, everyone had concluded that the master, in the absence of his mistress, had decided to enforce his long-neglected matrimonial rights to his wife and apparently overcame her objections by giving her a thorough thrashing, either before or after, in which the Avre somehow played a part.

Juliana gathered that not a few of Lasalle’s men heartily endorsed his methods, no doubt anticipating that he would divert some of his more onerous attentions from them to her. Rivefort’s wives offered more diffident opinions. Such speculations aside, the gossip proved to be correct on one account: After an unpleasant exchange with Jehan de Vaudreuil, Lasalle had ridden that very afternoon back to Tillières, where he took up residence in Diceto’s stews, got drunk like a Fleming, and remained so for an entire week. Now he was back at Rivefort. Perhaps she could hide out in the hayloft for the rest of her life.

Outside, the rain ceased pelting the roof and the sun broke through the clouds. Idleness is the enemy of the soul, Saint Benedict said. Juliana tucked up her skirts, climbed down the ladder, handed her basket to one of the servants, and told him that she could be found in her garden.

No sooner had she reached the flowerbeds than he found her about as welcome in her sanctuary as the plagues of Egypt. Bleary-eyed and bristle chinned, Lasalle lowered himself onto an overturned bucket, his elbows on his knees, his head between his fists. “Disciplining weeds, Sister?”

Keeping a safe distance from him, she shoved the tip of the spade under a dandelion. “You ride, fight, and hunt, sir. I garden.”

He took a deep breath, no doubt in place of something he truly wanted to say, and said instead, “Juliana, we have to speak of this. I am seldom entranced by lust and drink at the same time.” He raked his fingers through his hair. The splint was gone, but his voice was bound with anger. “Yours was a stupid idea, but it was my fault. Next time you’ll not find me that distracted.”

One would think that the quarrel had struck my lord Lasalle in the head. “You’ve done all that is required. As you’ve said, once is all that is necessary. I’ll fight your petition and the bishops will sustain me, like they sustained Queen Ingeborg when Philip tried to cast her aside. In her case, once was all that was necessary as well.”

Lasalle had her by her shoulders, spinning her to face him. “You don’t know what you have done, woman! And whose idea was it? Yours? Anne’s? Aliénor’s?”

He took a step back, stumbling over her wattles to sit back on her bucket. She tried not to pay him further mind. That proved to be difficult. “Since you are so clever, what will happen to your precious Tillières if you find yourself with child?”

The question was as sarcastic as the questioner. She shoved the debris into a pile. “That is impossible. Everyone knows that the woman has to enjoy the congress to conceive.”

Blessed martyrs, the man was a pest. She should have let him die. Lasalle shook his head in exasperation. “It becomes better the more you try.”

That was surely the silliest thing she had ever heard. She went back to her flowerbed. “I see. Like burning one’s hand and coming back for more? Are you speaking from personal experience, my lord?”

“I am told,” Lasalle snapped back. “Christ, girl, you may as well learn to enjoy the windfall of your determination.”

“You silly, ignorant chit.” He tried to keep his temper. “I am telling you, it doesn’t have to be that way. Anne said you kept me alive. Why, then?”

Oh Lord. She was certain that Jehan de Vaudreuil had told him of his threat, and now there was no way out of it. “He said that if I didn’t, he would raze Rivefort and hang me from the keep.”

Of all the ungrateful things to say. She wished she could strike this arrogant, deceitful man. “Compassion? That is something I can ill afford. Don’t preach to me about compassion. When have you ever shown compassion to anyone?”

He was looking at her as if she were a madwoman, and she did not care. “Do you think it was easy for me to come to you as I did? It wasn’t. I was afraid. You can’t ever imagine how afraid I was. But I did it, for this pile of rocks!” The words came in a heedless rush. “You took Jourdain from me. You never cared about him, but you took him from me just because you could. For that, I’ll never let you have Tillières. Never! You’ll have to kill me—aaah!”

“You let go of my lady, you wicked blackguard!” Someone barreled between them. It was Edith, a bundle of fury in a black gown.

Edith stayed, comforting her sobbing mistress well after her master had stormed out of the garden, having wrenched the new gate from its post.