She
lived as a queen, but she was a woman of infrequent laughter.
She had Duke Jehan's adoration, and his barons' obeisancy, and his
villagers applauded her passage with stentorian shouts. She passed
interminable days amid bright curious arrasses and trod listlessly
over pavements strewn with flowers. She had fiery-hearted jewels, and
shimmering purple cloths, and much furniture adroitly carven, and many
tapestries of Samarcand and Baldach upon which were embroidered, by
brown fingers that time had turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable
asps and deer and phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants
of air and of the thicket; but her memories, too, she had, and for a
dreary while she got no comfort because of them. Then ambition
quickened.
Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might; but at
the end of the second year after Jehane's wedding his uncle, the
Vicomte de Montbrison--a gaunt man, with preoccupied and troubled
eyes--had summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and, after appropriate
salutation, had informed the lad that, as the Vicomte's heir, he was
to marry the Demoiselle Gerberge de Nerac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.
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