But in the year of grace 1417 there was a breathing space for discredited France, and presently the Vicomte de Montbrison was sent into England, as ambassador. He got in London a fruitless audience of King Henry, whose demands were such as rendered a renewal of the war inevitable; and afterward got, in the month of April, about the day of Palm Sunday, at the Queen’s dower-palace of Havering-Bower, an interview with Queen Jehane.5
A curled pert page took the Vicomte to where she sat alone, by prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted by the sun, and made pretence to weave a tapestry. When the page had gone she rose and cast aside the shuttle, and then with a glad and wordless cry stumbled toward the Vicomte. “Madame and Queen—!” he coldly said.
His judgment found in her a quite ordinary, frightened woman, aging now, but still very handsome in these black and shimmering gold robes; but all his other faculties found her desirable: and with a contained hatred he had perceived, as if by the terse illumination of a thunderbolt, that he could never love any woman save the woman whom he most despised.
She said: “I had forgotten. I had remembered only you, Antoine, and Navarre, and the clean-eyed Navarrese—” Now for a little, Jehane paced the gleaming and sun-drenched apartment as a bright leopardess might tread her cage. Then she wheeled. “Friend, I think that God Himself has deigned to avenge you. All misery my reign has been. First Hotspur, then prim Worcester harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward to prick us with his devils’ horns. Followed the dreary years that linked me to the rotting corpse which God’s leprosy devoured while the poor furtive thing yet moved, and endured its share in the punishment of Manuel’s poisonous blood. All misery, Antoine! And now I live beneath a sword.”
“You have earned no more,” he said. “You have earned no more, O Jehane! whose only title is the Constant Lover!” He spat it out.
She came uncertainly toward him, as though he had been some not implacable knave with a bludgeon. “For the King hates me,” she plaintively said, “and I live beneath a sword. The big, fierce-eyed boy has hated me from the first, for all his lip-courtesy. And now he lacks the money to pay his troops, and I am the wealthiest person within his realm. I am a woman and alone in a foreign land. So I must wait, and wait, and wait, Antoine, till he devises some trumped-up accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword. Antoine!” she wailed—for now the pride of Queen Jehane was shattered utterly—“I am held as a prisoner for all that my chains are of gold.”
“Yet it was not until of late,” he observed, “that you disliked the metal which is the substance of all crowns.”
And now the woman lifted toward him her massive golden necklace, garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls, and in the sunlight the gems were tawdry things. “Friend, the chain is heavy, and I lack the power to cast it off. The Navarrese we know of wore no such perilous fetters. Ah, you should have mastered me at Vannes. You could have done so, very easily. But you only talked—oh, Mary pity us! you only talked!—and I could find only a servant where I had sore need to find a master. Let all women pity me!”
But now came many armed soldiers into the apartment. With spirit Queen Jehane turned to meet them, and you saw that she was of royal blood, for now the pride of many emperors blazed and informed her body as light occupies a lantern. “At last you come for me, messieurs?”
“Whereas,” the leader of these soldiers read from a parchment—“whereas the King’s stepmother, Queen Jehane, is accused by certain persons of an act of witchcraft that with diabolical and subtle methods wrought privily to destroy the King, the said Dame Jehane is by the King committed (all her attendants being removed) to the custody of Sir John Pelham, who will, at the King’s pleasure, confine her within Pevensey Castle, there to be kept under Sir John’s control: the lands and other properties of the said Dame Jehane being hereby forfeit to the King, whom God preserve!”
“Harry of Monmouth!” said Jehane—“ah, my tall stepson, could I but come to you, very quietly, with a knife—!” She shrugged her shoulders, and the gold about her person glittered in the sunlight. “Witchcraft! ohimé, one never disproves that. Friend, now are you avenged the more abundantly.”
“Young Riczi is avenged,” the Vicomte said; “and I came hither desiring vengeance.”
She wheeled, a lithe flame (he thought) of splendid fury. “And in the gutter Jehane dares say what Queen Jehane upon the throne might never say. Had I reigned all these years as mistress not of England but of Europe—had nations wheedled me in the place of barons—young Riczi had been none the less avenged. Bah! what do these so-little persons matter? Take now your petty vengeance! drink deep of it! and know that always within my heart the Navarrese has lived to shame me! Know that today you despise Jehane, the purchased woman! and that Jehane loves you! and that the love of proud Jehane creeps like a beaten cur toward your feet, in the sight of common men! and know that Riczi is avenged—you milliner!”
“Into England I came desiring vengeance—Apples of Sodom! O bitter fruit!” the Vicomte thought; “O fitting harvest of a fool’s assiduous husbandry!”
They took her from him: and that afternoon, after long meditation, the Vicomte de Montbrison entreated a second private audience of King Henry, and readily obtained it. “Unhardy is unseely,” the Vicomte said at this interview’s conclusion. The tale tells that the Vicomte returned to France and within this realm assembled all such lords as the abuses of the Queen-Regent Isabeau had
