CHAPTER 60
Something moved across her eyes. She refused to open them, not wanting to face the cold, the blackness, the sensation of rodents scurrying across her legs, her arms. A shadow passed over her, the shadow of Death. Wait. How could there be a shadow in a pitch-black tunnel? It was a question for Father Osbert. The darkness yielded to light, painful on her eyelids. I am dead and my suffering is over.
Someone was shaking her. If it was an angel, it was an exceedingly vigorous one. A man’s voice spoke and she was left alone, but the voices continued. She began to pick out the words. The angelic choirs spoke a rather common version of French. Juliana opened her eyes. This was not purgatory; it was paradise, a large chamber bright with sunlight and scented with unfamiliar spices. She was lying under a silk canopy on a sea of pillows. An angel in a cloud of white linen appeared, wearing perfume, her bow of painted lips smiling dutifully. “I am Ziya.”
“Where . . . am I?” Her voice sounded as if it had not been used for some time.
“We did not think you would wake.” The girl glanced at the door nervously.
“W-we?”
“Madame Violaine and the rest of us.”
“Madame Violaine?” Juliana raised her head and a sharp pain stabbed her between the eyes. She closed them and tried to think. Good Lord, I am not dead. And then she remembered.
Somehow Sister Eustace had escaped the tunnels to end up in a Parisian brothel. Juliana covered her face and began to laugh. It was not much of a laugh, but it was all she could do. “Tell Madame that I will make a very poor whore. You can ask my . . . my lord Lasalle. Perhaps he mentioned it to you in passing.”
“He did not mention it, not even in passing. You can ask Ziya, Lady Juliana,” a familiar, resonant male voice answered from behind her.
Had she had the strength, she would have bounded up like a flushed deer. She only managed to fling herself sideways before Ziya, at the sharp command in the man’s voice, restrained her. Her elbow struck Ziya’s eye socket, and the girl cried out and slumped to her knees. Juliana felt a flash of regret; she had not meant to hurt the girl, though she had no such scruples when it came to her other opponent. He was not as tender as the courtesan; he simply flung her back onto the pillows and held her there.
“I hate you!” she hissed with all the malevolence her puny strength allowed, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Do you? I was hoping you would get to know me better first,” the man said with amused disappointment.
She opened one eye, opened it wider, and then both wider still.
“I know.” The man sighed. “Infuriating, isn’t it, the resemblance? Guérin is the only one with our mother’s eyes. That is why few people are able to tell that Armand is his father. Few doubt that he is mine.”
It was the voice of Armand de Lusignan, the same patrician features, the same thunder-blue eyes. But this was a younger man, closer to Lasalle’s age. He not only released her; he proceeded to arrange the pillows for her, and when he finished, he sat back against his own bolsters.
“Do poultice that thing, Ziya, or you will lose customers. My sister-in-law and I will manage,” he said to the girl, who was examining herself in her girdle mirror.
Sniffling in distress, Ziya left them with a sway of her hips. The man smiled and turned his attention from them to Juliana. “I am Geoffrey de Lusignan,” he said. “Geoffrey of Parthenay, if it impresses you any better. The title belongs to my brother but he has never assumed it, just as he never calls himself Jean Armand de Lusignan.”
Speechlessness could be as proper a response as anything. Juliana availed herself of it.
“Perhaps I should return when you are feeling stronger, Lady Juliana.”
“N-no. I must be mad . . . I know you.”
The black eyebrow shot up. “Of course you do. We met in Rivefort’s chapel. You apologized for my brother.”
The man seated casually across from her wore a silk tartaire over a very fine shirt, a waist belt with a gold buckle, and a dagger with an enameled hilt of Saracen craftsmanship. The beard was gone, the hair cut back, the cheekbones high and sharp under browned skin.
“The Templar,” she said to herself in disbelief.
The Lord of Parthenay bowed slightly. “The very same. Don’t let these circumstances confuse you, dear sister. Sometimes it is necessary to bend one’s vows a little, don’t you agree? My Order finds it regrettable, but permissible when it is necessary to protect its interests.”
“The Countess de Nevers . . . your aunt said you became a monk.”
Geoffrey de Lusignan laughed, the laugh an echo of Armand de Lusignan’s to the last inflection. “I tried, but we Lusignans make terrible Benedictines. “ ‘Go to the Temple,’ ” my abbot said, “ ‘and one day you will become Grand Master.’ So I took him up on it.”
Coming from any other man, it would have been a vainglorious boast, but hearing it from this man, Juliana did not doubt the explanation; he was, after all, a Lusignan. Had he become her new jailer? “Your brother wanted to kill me! What do you want from me?” She sat up, but did not know she had made the other gesture until Geoffrey de Lusignan’s gaze shifted to her middle, not tactfully. Dread enveloped her. “Oh God. I lost it.”
“You were ill. Would that be relief or regret?”
She had no answer, but her desolation became bottomless anguish. “He wanted me to die there! I was so frightened, so frightened. . . . How could he have done such a thing, how could anyone? I hate him, I hate him!”
She did not know how long her outburst lasted, but when she again became aware of her surroundings, a steady, strong hand was stroking her hair. She was being comforted by a man who was not even supposed to look at the face of his own mother. She clung to him nevertheless, racked by sobs.
“He did not want you to die there. We used to explore the aqueduct when we were boys. Our father had the passage blocked. He expected that Guérin would try to get you away through the tunnels, and he let him do it.”
Her sobs subsiding, she let go and sniffled into her sleeve. “That is a lie. The count wanted the child. He would want me safe!”
Her companion nodded. “That, too, is true.”
“It can’t be both! Lasalle had a reason to see me dead, not the count. How did I come to be here? Whose creature are you?”
Lasalle’s older brother regarded her steadily, ignoring her accusations. “I serve God and my Order, Lady Juliana, but I also have a personal interest in Lasalle, as you so affectionately call your husband, and in you, as well.”
She pushed aside the cushions and got herself to her knees. “I am nothing to you or to him. You need not bother with me. I can fend for myself. If you would order my release, I shall return to Tillières and will not breathe a word about any of you, I swear it. No one will ever know.”
“They all will in a few months.”
She froze, her hand to her middle. It felt fuller. “But you said—”
“That you were ill. Do you wish to get rid of it now?”
She did not know whether it was the announcement or the question that knocked her on her seat. “How can you . . . you want me to . . . ?”
“If you decide now, no harm will come to you, Madame Violaine assures me. I assured her that if she lied, I would kill her.”
Shock, relief, doubt, and confusion made her dizzy. From the door, a tactful cough announced another presence. Geoffrey de Lusignan acknowledged it with a slight nod. “Madame Violaine. It seems Lady Juliana has made her decision.”
“No. I did not!” She tried to stand up. Her muscles seized. She could not stand, let alone run. A sob of despair escaped her. “You want to kill it. That’s all you do. You kill things! You destroy everything and anyone in your way. You are all murderers!”
Geoffrey barked an order and Madame Violaine vanished in a trail of black silks. Geoffrey de Lusignan sat back on his heels. “Listen to me. No one will harm you or your child.”
She was shaking. She was trapped. “You are all liars! He never wanted this marriage! He wanted to make me an adulteress to get rid of me. He did not want this child. He told me to go to Anne to kill it.” Geoffrey of Parthenay reached out for her. She struck him again and again, her strength one of frenzied desperation. Finally she began to tire, and he let her go.
“He was already married, Juliana.”