Page 75 of The Captive Knight
Chapter Twenty-One
Palais de la Cité, Paris
October, 1356
“Aliénor de Tournan.”
The words echoed in the rafters of the royal palace. She stilled among the row of stone pillars carved with the likenesses of the kings of France, sure she’d dreamt what she’d just heard.
“Thibaud,” she blurted, gripping his arm.
“Aliénor de Tournan, come forward before your prince.”
Her uncle moved into action, shoving a shoulder between two clergymen standing in front of them before thrusting her bodily into the gap. When the strangers whirled in outrage, she slipped around them only to crash into others.
“Coming through,” Thibaud bellowed, elbowing deeper into the great hall. “His Grace has summoned my kinswoman.Let. Us. Through.”
Though she’d been living in Paris for months, Aliénor still couldn’t believe the crush of petitioners who swarmed every official court gathering. King Jean wasn’t even in residence—either then or now. Back then, he’d marched his army south to stop the approach of the Prince of Wales’ forces. He’d left behind his hapless and powerless representatives to hear the pleas of the dispossessed from a war that had made beggars of them all. And now King Jean was a prisoner of the English, captured during the disastrous battle at Poitiers.
With so much upheaval, she’d all but given up ever having her petition heard. Yet now, as she stumbled into the clearing before the dais, she found herself face-to-face with the king’s firstborn son Charles, known as the Dauphin and acting regent of France.
She dipped into a curtsey beside a bowing Thibaud, very glad she’d made the effort to fix a tear on the hem of her honey-colored kirtle last night.
A low, bored voice spoke her name.
“Yes.” She straightened up. “Yes, it is I, Your Grace.”
The regent, red-headed, ruddy-faced, and perhaps a few years younger than herself, sprawled in a carved, gilded chair pushed away from a black marble table. Unsurprisingly, he looked weary. He’d returned from a crushing military defeat to take his seat in a bankrupt city, with the people in revolt, and a contender for the throne churning up discontent all through the countryside.
The regent tapped the desk upon which was spread a wealth of parchments. “It says here you’re from Gascony.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” She swallowed the lump in her throat to deliver the one piece of news that had found its way to their humble lodgings near the Abbey of St. Martin. “My father, the Viscount of Tournan, fought beside your father at Poitiers. My father died on the field of battle.”
She lowered her head not to hide raw grief, but a lingering sorrow. In truth, she’d lost her father a dozen years ago at Crécy.
“Many a good man died on the battlefield,” the regent said, nodding his head, as she’d seen him do many times when other petitioners spoke similar words. “My sympathies, mademoiselle, for your loss.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“Your father’s lands,” he said, as he ran his fingers over the three stripes of ermine on the sleeve of his robe. “Where are they?”
“On the border between Aquitaine and the lands of the counts of Toulouse,” she said, as Thibaud had tutored her, “at least the border as it once stood before the prince burned his way across Gascony.”
The regent leaned to one side and perused a map one of his aides had lifted into the light. Beside her, Thibaud shifted his weight, stifled by the protocol forbidding him from addressing the regent before being spoken to.
Lifting his gaze from the map, the regent asked, “How many castles?”
“One castle seat.” By the way the regent’s lips tightened, he clearly thought a single castle a meager estate. “We had another,” she added, “but the English took it earlier in the war—”
“One castle,” he interrupted, “and another one stolen, and yet you have friends in high places.”
“Your Grace?”
“I’ve received not one buttwopetitions in your name, mademoiselle.”
She sidled her uncle a confused glance. His face was turning red with the effort to hold his tongue. “Perhaps my uncle,” she ventured, “who has some history in your grandfather’s service, can clarify—”
“I have read your uncle’s petition. It’s theotherthat intrigues me.” He lifted a paper from one of the piles. Light sifted through it so she could see a dark wax seal weighing it down. “This one arrived just yesterday,” he said. “It’s written by a knight in the Prince of Wales’ service.”
