Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,139

She also approved Joanna’s selection of wines from Isaac’s buttery: an Italian vernage, a wine named after the city of Tyre, sweet wines from Greece, local red wines, and the costly spiced wine known as hippocras.

When she fretted, though, that Joanna might be undertaking too much in light of her recent illness, the Sicilian queen brushed her qualms aside, saying staunchly, “I am not going to let my sister-by-marriage be wed in a cursory manner. Now . . . how does this sound to you? In addition to our own minstrels, we will have harpists and other musicians who can play the rebec and the lute. Also tumblers and a man who can juggle torches—or so he says. I suppose we can have pails of water on hand, just in case. And one of the Genoese merchants will provide a trumpeter to introduce the courses.”

Glancing around, then, to make sure the other women were not within hearing, Joanna lowered her voice. “How are you bearing up? Are you nervous? Most brides are,” she said quickly, lest Berengaria take the question as an implied criticism.

“Yes . . . a little. But not as much as I expected to be,” Berengaria confided. She was about to thank Joanna again, this time for her counseling about the marriage bed, when they were informed that André de Chauvigny had just arrived.

“Have you noticed how often André has been stopping by?” Joanna asked as they made their way toward the great hall. “He’s been paying court to Hélène, who told him forthrightly that he is very charming and very married. Apparently he is also very stubborn.”

But as soon as they reached the hall, they discovered that Joanna’s cousin had more on his mind than a casual dalliance. “Three sails were sighted on the horizon,” André reported even before greetings had been exchanged. “As these galleys were coming from the east, we thought they might be bringing word of the siege of Acre. The king, bless him, was not willing to wait patiently on shore, and went out to meet them in a small boat. He was soon back, sending me to tell you there will be highborn guests for dinner—Guy de Lusignan, his brother Joffroi, Humphrey de Toron, whose wife was stolen so shamefully by Conrad of Montferrat, the Prince of Antioch, the Count of Tripoli, and the brother of the Prince of Armenia.”

Joanna stared at him, and then looked at Berengaria, the same dismayed thought in both their minds: As if they did not have enough to do, with the wedding scheduled for the morrow! “The de Lusignans,” Joanna said wearily, “have always had a deplorable sense of timing.”

GUY DE LUSIGNAN was quite handsome, tall and well formed, with curly brown hair and hazel eyes, clean-shaven in the fashion of Outremer. And he was young to have gained and lost a kingdom and a queen, not that much older than Richard. He was very attentive to Joanna and Berengaria, flirtatious and lavish with the practiced charm that had served him so well in the past. Neither woman liked him at all.

They both felt some sympathy for Humphrey de Toron, Queen Isabella’s discarded husband. He, too, was very handsome, but without Guy’s swagger, his dark eyes filled with intelligence and sadness, a poet in a land that venerated soldiers. They felt even more sympathy for his young wife, though, pulled from his gentle embrace and thrust against her will into the arms of Conrad of Montferrat, a man as unlike Humphrey as a sword blade was unlike a lute. How alone and abandoned she must have felt, a young girl of eighteen confronted with Conrad’s iron will, with an ally in her own mother. But Humphrey had failed her, too. A husband unwilling or unable to fight for his wife was not a husband either of them would want. The world was too dangerous a place to depend upon the protection of poets.

After the meal was done, the conversation turned to politics. Richard was infuriated to learn that Philippe had arbitrarily recognized Conrad as King of Jerusalem, and he agreed to aid Guy in reclaiming the crown, giving the destitute king without a kingdom the sum of two thousand silver marks, for Guy had expended the last of his resources upon the siege of Acre. Watching as Guy, his brother, Humphrey, and one hundred sixty of their knights knelt and did homage to Richard, Joanna was grimly amused by the irony inherent in that dramatic