CHAPTER XVI

CONVERSATION IN ENGLAND OF JEHANE THE FAIR

It was in the gules of August, we read, that King Richard set out for his duchy and kingdom, on horseback, riding alone, splendid in red and gold; Countess Jehane in a litter; his true brother and his half-brother, his bishops, his chancellor, and his friends with him, each according to his degree.  They went by Alencon, Lisieux, and Pont l’Eveque to Rouen; and there they found the Queen-Mother, an unquenchable spirit.  One of Richard’s first acts had been to free her from the fortress in which, for ten years or more, the old King had kept her.  There were no prison-traces upon her when she met her son, and fixed her son’s mistress with a calculating eye.  A low-browed, swarthy woman, heavily built, with the wreck of great beauty upon her, having fingers like the talons of a bird and a trap-mouth; it was not hard to see that into the rocky mortice where Richard had been cast there went some grains of flint from her.  She had slow, deliberate movements of the body, but a darting mind; she was a most passionate woman, but frugal of her passion, eking it out to cover long designs.  Whether she loved or hated—­and she could glow with either lust until she seemed incandescent—­she went slowly to work.  The quicker she saw, the slower she was reducing sight into possession.  With all this, like her son Richard, she was capable of strong revulsions.  Thus she had loved, then hated King Henry; thus she was to spurn, then to cling to Jehane.

At Rouen she did her best to crush the young girl to the pavement with her intolerable flat-lidded eyes.  When Jehane saw her stand on the steps of the church amidst the pomp of Normandy and England—­three archbishops by her, William Marshal, William Longchamp, the earls, the baronage, the knights, heralds, blowers of trumpets; when at her example all this glory of Church and State bent the knee to Richard of Anjou, and he, kneeling in turn, kissed his mother’s hand, then rose and to the others gave his to be kissed; when he, vowed to her, pledged to her, known of her more secretly than of any, passed through the blare of horns alone into the soaring nave—­Jehane shivered and crossed herself, faltered a little, and might have fallen.  Her King was doing by her as she had prayed him; but the scrutiny of the Queen-Mother had been a dry gloss to the text.  She had been able to bear her forsaking with a purer heart, but for the narrow eyes that witnessed it and gleamed.  One of her ladies, Magdalene Coucy, put an arm about her; so Countess Jehane stiffened and jerked up her head, and after that walked with no more faltering.  If she had seen, as Milo saw, Gilles de Gurdun glowering at her from a corner, it might have gone hard with her.  But she did not.