Chivalry

Richard Holland

Richard has spent years in the East, assumed his half-brothers' surname, and received Glyndwyr's summons that England is now fit pasture for the White Hart. He proposes to wait, disguised and apparently unguarded, at Caer Idion so that Henry of Lancaster will come in person to make sure of his death — a trap Glyndwyr's hundred men will close. Yet Richard himself has grown indifferent to whether the scheme succeeds, insisting no man can rule otherwise than abominably; that weary skepticism, set against Glyndwyr's undimmed hatred, is what makes his gamble so strange and so compelling.

Osmund Heleigh

Messire Osmund Heleigh is the Queen's escort on a journey that requires them to pass as wandering minstrels, and he procures the viol, the clothes, and the long falchion himself. He is lank, white-thatched, humorously peevish, fretted by the sword tapping at his ankles, and he calls her mon bel esper because he wrote the phrase thirty years ago and has not forgotten. Against her appetite for vengeance — she laughs at Falmouth's coin because she knows she will have his head — Osmund's dry, beaten-child tenderness gives their flight its peculiar ache.

John Copeland

Sir Gregory Darrell is bound by a promise — a truth once spoken may not be disowned — to perform a lengthy ditty detailing the Queen's treacheries, adulteries, and assassinations without stuttering. He delivers it desperately, countersigning his own death warrant, yet the song's vigor seems to please its contriver, and he adds a new peroration about a boy and a girl and his own bewildered heart. The Countess of Farrington, listening, cuts a fly in two with her dagger and coolly proposes that Ysabeau might make the singer her master — a suggestion that turns the performance into a wager on his life.

Edward Maudelain

Edward Maudelain, once the Blessed Evrawc, is visited by an emissary in flame-colored satin who brings a message — Time is — and a lock of hair that should have been dust five years since. He scatters it hair by hair, prizes up the hearthstone for a leather bag, and buys a horse and sword that same day, riding eastward in secular apparel. His physical resemblance to his half-brother Richard the Second enables an imposture that carries him to Pontefract, where Piers Exton's men close the door and tell Sire Richard to eat his fill, since he will not eat again.

Antoine Riczi

Riczi's desires clutch like starving persons at the sorry sustenance of a love he cannot have, since Jehane is married to old Jehan the Brave; he asks her to bid him live, and she prays she may be denied even Judas's one bleak night of ease if she falters. She does not weep, and he remembers that through long years of severance. Summoned to Lyonnois as his uncle's heir, he declines the Demoiselle de Nérac and every subsequent candidate, dwelling at Montbrison in stubborn singleness until Duke Jehan's death in 1401 sends him riding for Vannes with no unhallowed joy.

Lady Katharine

Lady Katharine meets Alain, a harper bound for Milan to take Duke Filippo's service, when his hunt for a chicken-stealing fox leads him to her wall; they talk two hours as if seated on the loftiest turret of Paradise, and he tells her destiny brought him. She goes to her apartments singing an inane spring song and bursts into tears, reflecting that hosts of women-children are born every day who are not princesses and therefore need not marry detestable kings. At dawn she is in the orchard under a cloudy sky, watching coppery light flare against the gray like embers swaddled by ashes.