“You did not get Mariam to change her mind about marriage?” Joanna said sympathetically, and he shook his head in frustration.
“She is so stubborn!” He muttered something in Welsh that they did not understand, but it sounded like an obscenity. “I am at my wit’s end,” he confessed, “for she refuses to listen to reason. She respects your opinion, my lady. Can you not get her to see that her refusal makes no sense?”
“Ah, Morgan . . . I am on your side in this, but I do not want to meddle—” Joanna got no further, as Dame Beatrix was laughing outright and Berengaria was smiling, while Morgan chivalrously but unsuccessfully attempted to keep a straight face. Joanna couldn’t help smiling herself. “Well, I may have been known to meddle occasionally,” she admitted. “But in truth, Morgan, I have already urged Mariam to accept your offer of marriage, to no avail.”
Morgan’s shoulders slumped, for Joanna had been his last hope. “I will be leaving on the morrow,” he said, thanking them again for their hospitality. He half expected them to urge him to stay longer, but they were nodding understandingly.
“I expect that you need to get back to the siege at Aumale,” Joanna said, to his surprise.
“You heard about the siege?”
She nodded. “Well, only that the French king had arrived at the castle with an army. I just assumed that Richard will race to the rescue and Philippe will flee the way he always does, like a rabbit with hounds on his heels.”
Morgan was quiet for a moment, deciding how much to tell them. He finally decided upon the truth, for it was best that they know Aumale would be a very sensitive subject with Richard for the foreseeable future. “Actually, the king already attempted to raise the siege and failed,” he said, and almost smiled at their expressions of stunned disbelief. Not that he blamed them; he could not remember himself the last time Richard had suffered a military defeat.
“When we arrived at Aumale, we saw that we were outnumbered and the French siege camp was so well entrenched that the king’s first instinct was to back away. But he felt honor-bound to do all he could for the trapped garrison, and so he led an attack on the camp, only to be driven off.”
The women were silent, digesting this startling turn of events. “That must have been difficult for him to accept,” Berengaria said at last, in what Morgan thought was a classic understatement.
“It was, my lady. He intends to make another attempt as soon as he gathers more troops. Whilst waiting for them, he went off to besiege Gaillon Castle, which is held by Philippe’s routier captain, Cadoc.” At that moment, he saw Mariam entering the far end of the garden and he scowled, thinking that he ought to ride away for good; why pine over a woman who did not want him?
Mariam had halted at the sight of Morgan, and Joanna sought to dispel the sudden tension by snatching at the first topic to come to mind—the recent marriage of the French king to a German duke’s daughter, Agnes of Meran. Since the Pope had adamantly refused to recognize the divorce that Philippe had procured from the Bishop of Beauvais and other compliant French prelates, this remarriage had created almost as much of a scandal as Philippe’s repudiation of Ingeborg. Fernando and Anna had approached in time to hear Joanna’s remark and an animated discussion now ensued about Philippe, Ingeborg, and Agnes, who was acknowledged as queen only at the French court. None of them could understand why Agnes’s male relatives had been willing to make such a match, knowing she’d be viewed as Philippe’s concubine throughout the rest of Christendom. Fernando had just made a bawdy jest about Philippe and Agnes’s wedding night, earning himself a mildly reproving look from his elder sister, when a servant approached to murmur a few words in Joanna’s ear.
“Good heavens,” she blurted out, so great was her surprise. “Mercadier has just ridden in!”
Berengaria frowned, for she shared the view of routiers as lowborn killers. It troubled her greatly that her husband had admitted a man like Mercadier into his inner circle, that he showed the routier such favor. He was Lord of Beynac now, for Richard had given him the lands of a Périgord lord who’d died without an heir, and he’d even married into the local aristocracy, wedding the sister of the Seigneur of Lesparre. But to much of their world, he would always remain the scarred, brutal outsider, one of the Devil’s own.