The tent flap had barely closed on Clothilde
when the man opened his eyes. Twin pools of brilliant blue regarded
Danise with an intensity strong enough to make her hold her breath.
He did not speak. When she could bear the silent scrutiny no
longer, Danise asked, “Can you tell me your name?”
Still that intent stare, clouded now by a
growing anxiety. He moistened his dry lips.
“
Je ne sais pas
,” he whispered.
It took her a moment or two to understand
what he was trying to say. The language he used was not Frankish,
though it was somewhat similar.
“You don’t know your own name?” Thinking she
might have misunderstood him, she touched her bosom. “Danise. I am
Danise. And you?” She laid her hand on his chest.
“No!” He nearly knocked her over when he
tried to get out of bed. “No!”
“Guntram!” Danise did not need to call him;
Guntram was with her before the word was out of her mouth. He
forced the stranger back onto the bed and kept him there. The
stranger put both hands up to his head, holding it tight and
groaning.
“He’s in pain,” Guntram said. “It’s the head
wound. Stay there!” he shouted at the man on the bed and shook his
finger for emphasis. The man stared back at him, then nodded to
show he understood. Guntram released his hold on the man and stood
watching him, ready to prevent any threat against Danise.
“He can’t remember his name,” Danise
explained. “My asking upset him.”
“His confusion will end when the swelling is
gone,” Guntram replied. “Don’t give him anything to eat or drink
until tomorrow. If you do feed him, he may vomit and choke to
death.”
At that moment Savarec returned with a
black-robed physician and the physician’s assistant, who carried a
basket filled with supplies.
“Charles has sent us the royal physician,”
Savarec explained. “He said his physician may as well practice on
this man, since
he
is never sick enough to give the doctors
employment.” Guntram and Savarec exchanged manly grins at this
statement, acknowledging Charles’s famous good health and
vitality.
“You must leave,” the physician announced,
waving them toward the tent opening. His assistant took a pottery
jar out of the basket.
“What are you going to do?” asked Danise,
unwilling to turn her patient over to anyone else, even the king’s
own physician.
“Why, I’ll put leeches around his head wound
to reduce the swelling,” the physician replied. “It’s the best
treatment. He will awaken sooner with my help.”
“When he did wake for a moment or two, he
seemed to have no memory,” Guntram said.
“Then he is in dire need of my treatment, and
the sooner, the better.” The physician waved again. “Go, please,
all of you.”
“You may need someone to hold him down,”
Guntram said.
“My assistant is stronger than he looks.” The
physician turned his back on them and lifted the lid off the jar of
leeches that the assistant held out to him.
“He’s quite right,” Savarec said. “Physician,
I’ll leave my man Guntram outside the tent in case you need him.
Danise, come with me. It’s time I spoke with you about my reason
for ordering you to join me here at Duren.”
Danise knew well that particular note in her
father’s voice. She made no objection. After a backward glance
toward the bed and the physician bending over it, she followed
Savarec out of his tent.
“Here is Sister Gertrude, come from the
queen,” said Savarec, pausing to let a tall, thin nun join them.
“How does Hildegarde? Better today, I hope.”
“She is as well as any woman can be who is
forced to bear child after child with only a few months of rest
between each pregnancy,” Sister Gertrude told him tartly.
“Hildegarde is not forced.” Savarec’s method
of dealing with Sister Gertrude was always to speak mildly and
calmly in response to her verbal provocations, and he did so now.
“Hildegarde loves Charles deeply and truly, as he loves her. Their
affection for each other is beautiful to see.”
“The problem of loving between men and
women,” said Sister Gertrude with no diminution of sharpness, “is
that for the men it is all loving and pleasure, while for the women
there is the burden of childbearing and the ills that go with it.
Not to mention the trials of motherhood for a woman whose husband
is away fighting for half the year, leaving her to attend to his
lands as well as his children.”
“Sister Gertrude,” Savarec warned, “you will
turn Danise away from a woman’s natural desire to be a wife and
mother.”
“So I hope to do, and thus prolong her life
and her happiness,” responded the nun, meeting Savarec’s glance
with glittering eyes.
“Both of you, please come into your tent,”
Savarec bid them. “I will not discuss my daughter’s future here in
public.”
“There is precious little privacy in a tent,”
Sister Gertrude told him. “All the way here from seeing Hildegarde
I could not avoid noticing what people were saying and doing in
their tents. It is disgraceful the activities supposedly decent
folk will resort to in the middle of the day.” But she did follow
Savarec into the undyed woolen tent she shared with Danise and
Clothilde.
Savarec pulled the entrance flaps closed,
then turned to face the two women. The tent was small, with barely
space enough for three narrow folding cots and a couple of clothes
chests. There was no other furniture.
“Sit down, Father.” Danise motioned him to
one of the beds, then sat facing him, with Sister Gertrude beside
her. “I am curious, since you have been content to let me stay at
Chelles undisturbed since last autumn. Why did you want to see me
now?”
“The time has come,” Savarec informed her,
“for us to discuss your marriage.”
“Marriage?” Danise repeated, looking
distressed. “This is what I feared. Father, you promised me you
would not force me. You gave me your word.”
“And I will not break it. I was too happy
with your mother ever to insist that our daughter should wed a man
she does not like. But, Danise, if you are to marry at all, it must
be soon, before you are too old. Over the past winter I received
several offers for your hand. I thought it would be a good idea for
you to meet the men who are interested in you, so you will be
better able to decide if any of them pleases you.”
“What will you do if none of them pleases
her?” Sister Gertrude asked. “If Danise decides she wants to return
to Chelles to live, rather than marry, what will your response to
her be, Savarec?”
“Danise, I will never force you into a
decision that will make you unhappy. Because you are so dear to me,
I will allow you to decide for yourself whether to marry or to
devote yourself to the religious life.”
“You know what I will advise,” Sister
Gertrude said to Danise. “Spend your life safe and comfortable at
Chelles, and thus avoid all the problems and heartbreak of marriage
to a Frankish warrior. You have heard the story of my youth,
Danise, of how I was betrothed to a man who, against all my pleas,
left me to go to war, and how he died in battle. He claimed to love
me, but he left me. The same fate, the same bitter grief, could
easily befall you if you marry.”
“No man worthy of the name of warrior would
heed a woman’s tears and entreaties to stay at home when his honor
and loyalty to his king required him to go to war,” Savarec said
sternly.
“Father.” Danise looked at her parent with
troubled eyes. “There is something you do not know, which I now
must tell you. Last year, when the queen requested my presence at
court and you sent me to Agen with Sister Gertrude here, under the
protection of Count Theuderic and his men – during our long journey
across Francia I became fond of one of those men.” She stopped,
trying to think how to explain to her father what it had been like
during those enchanted spring weeks of riding through the
countryside with a man she had loved from their very first
meeting.
“Hugo was good and kind and a most honorable
man,” Danise went on. “When we reached Agen, he told Charles boldly
that he wanted to marry me and begged Charles’s permission to ask
my hand of you. Charles promised he might, when the Spanish
campaign was completed, after Hugo had earned rewards to make him
wealthy. Charles all but promised him a great estate and a title.”
Again Danise stopped, this time choked by tears.
“He knows, child.” Sister Gertrude’s hand
touched Danise’s with surprising gentleness. “I wrote to Savarec
soon after Charles and his army returned to Agen from Spain.
Charles sent my letter along with his own message to Savarec. Your
father knows your affection for Hugo was both true and innocent. He
knows you did not lie with Hugo. At least my watchfulness was able
to save you from that much grief after Hugo’s death at Roncevaux.
Your body remains untouched, and I believe your heart will heal in
time, for you are still young, and there was nothing formal between
you, no betrothal vows.”
“You knew, all these months, and you never
mentioned it in any of your letters to me?” Danise looked at her
father. “Is that why you let me stay at Chelles so long?”
“Sister Gertrude thought it would be best for
you, and I agreed,” Savarec said. “But you cannot dwell forever in
the past. Eventually, as I had to do after your sweet mother died,
you must make your peace with what has happened and go on with the
remainder of your life. I will leave the choice of wedlock or the
religious life to you as I have promised, Danise, but I would not
have you remain at Chelles solely because you are afraid to face
the world again after Hugo’s death. You have had more than nine
months in which to mourn him. For the weeks of this Mayfield at
Duren and the coming summer at Deutz with me, I ask you to consider
what good you may do in the world if you marry and have children
and make some noble Frank happy – for any man married to you must
be a happy man.”
“I need not repeat my opinion on this
proposal,” Sister Gertrude said.
“Indeed not,” said Savarec with unusual
asperity. “We know your thoughts on marriage all too well.”
“You will give me until the end of summer to
decide?” Danise asked.
“I will.” Savarec smiled at her. “I have no
doubt you would like to hear the names of the men who have offered
for you.”
“The choice of possible husbands might sway
my decision,” Danise admitted, smiling back at him. How dear and
kind he was. How much she loved him. She knew her happiness was
important to him.
“You have three suitors,” Savarec said.
“First, there is Count Clodion.”
“An ancient ogre!” cried Sister Gertrude.
“The man has had three wives already and has killed all of them
with constant childbearing. He even offered for me when I was
younger. That would be thirty years ago at least. I suppose he
wants someone young and strong to nurse him in his dotage, though
with his history he may yet hope to get more children on a young
wife.”
“Clodion’s offer was honestly made,” Savarec
said patiently. “Therefore, we will consider it with equal honesty.
He is an important nobleman. However, I must admit, I would prefer
to see Danise wed to someone closer to her own age.”
“Who else asked for me, Father?” It was so
strange to sit here in her tent and discuss in this detached way
the qualities of men she did not know, one of whom, before the
summer was over, might be her husband. Did she want to marry?
Danise could not deny to herself certain stirrings of her body,
urgings not completely quelled by the tragic loss of her beloved
Hugo. He had scarcely touched her and had kissed her only a few
times, but his affection for her had been deep and enduring. She
would have married Hugo gladly and given him all her heart and soul
until she died. But he had died first, while she was young and
healthy and of a disposition to embrace life. Chelles had been a
safe place to which she had retreated after Hugo’s death to nurse
her aching heart and her disappointed hopes. Danise did not think
she had a vocation strong enough to keep her contentedly at Chelles
until she was an old woman. Still, she was wise enough to know she
ought not to close the door on a religious life before she had
definitely made up her mind. As for possible husbands, Count
Clodion seemed to be favored by neither her father nor Sister
Gertrude. “Tell me about the other men, Father.”
“There is Autichar, who is a Bavarian
nobleman of great note, and who holds lands as vast as Clodion’s.”
Savarec was but a minor member of the nobility and he was perhaps
too easily impressed by rank and wealth. Danise could tell he held
Autichar in great esteem and had been honored by the offer for her
hand.
“Autichar’s loyalty to Charles has come into
question,” noted Sister Gertrude. “Autichar is a known companion of
Duke Tassilo of Bavaria, who is no friend to Charles, though the
two are close cousins. If a dispute arises between Charles and
Tassilo, and from what I have heard of Tassilo’s character it is
inevitable, on whose side will Autichar fight? Do you want to
oppose your son-in-law on a battlefield, Savarec?”
“Is there no man on earth of whom you
approve?” Savarec’s face was growing red with suppressed anger.
“I want Danise to be happy just as much as
you do,” Sister Gertrude told him. “But I do not think marriage
will make her happy.”
“If you will let me finish,” said Savarec
between clenched teeth, “perhaps you can find one good thing to say
about the third man who is interested in my daughter.”
“Who is he, Father?” Trying to avert one of
Savarec’s rare outbursts of temper, Danise said, “I promise I will
most seriously consider all of these men, and if they are here at
Duren, I will ask you to present me to them, so I can be at least
somewhat familiar with all of them before I decide.”