Anne was still getting dressed when Eleanor arrived. “Oh, I had not expected to see you until later.” At Adele’s tut Anne turned her head back to face front again, sitting meekly still as the maid worked at her hair.
Eleanor cast about for a seat and gave up; there were none in this cupboard of a room. Instead she stood before, out of the way. “I am always up early, you should know that by now.”
“Yes, but … well, you did just get married.”
Eleanor’s eyes rolled heavenwards. Well, there was some grain of truth in that accusation, perhaps. If Fulk had not been so neatly to hand she would not have wasted minutes trying to make the man understand that he should have woken her and told her of Anne’s arrival when he returned from his excursion. All very well for him to insist she had been asleep – that was precisely the point! Slumbering away precious time in which she could have prepared countermeasures against this unreliable stepmother of hers.
Forgetting herself, Anne turned her head again, causing Adele to scurry around to keep the braid she was working on from tearing at her lady’s scalp. “I barely saw you the day before you left, and then you went so early in the morning I did not have chance to say goodbye.”
“We had a lot to plan.” And she had wanted none of it reaching Anne’s ears, for fear of where else it may reach and what harebrained notions the girl may grow from a little knowledge.
“You look a lot less tired. Really, you do, and less worried.” A shy smile stole over the girl’s face. “There must be some truth in what they say: a good knight-”
“Yes, yes, yes,” interrupted Eleanor, feeling her cheeks flame. “So everyone keeps telling me.” A good (k)night in bed does wonders for your health. Very droll. “I had not expected you to sink to such depths; crude puns indeed!”
Far from being chastened, Anne giggled. “I think it rather clever.”
“And there is proof romance stories rot the mind,” remarked Eleanor dryly.
Anne clicked her fingers over her shoulder, prompting Adele back into action on her hair. “You are happy though; it shows.”
“Yes. Very.”
“I would not have thought it made so much difference, except in that you do not have to pretend not to care for each other.”
“It does. It is as if …” Eleanor’s search for words was not aided by the memories adjoining that which she was trying to express; most distracting, they filled her with a warm glow. If before she had known he loved her, then now a thousand thousand new proofs made that knowledge bone deep, making it something that simply
was. No more secrets, no more holding back, no more fears. An awareness of him keener than before, as though some part of him had remained with her and of her with him. The simple joy of having more time with him and no longer any need for them to hide. A deep sense of peace, contentment flowing like a river under the eddies of worry, fear, strain. “It is all deeper.”
“Everyone is talking of it – the court, soldiers, servants, companions, the people you passed by. You have become one of those stories you just disdained. The princess who married her knight-”
“And lived happily ever after?”
Anne took a while to answer. “There is no ending, not yet. They all have their own ideas, coloured by what they think of it.”
Eleanor bared her teeth in a mirthless grin. “And in how many of those tales am I struck down by a righteous thunderbolt?”
The girl’s chin ducked down. “I do not like to listen to those ones, or the other nasty ones.” Her face came back up again, to regard Eleanor with shining eyes. “Do you know that in one version Fulk is my half-brother, my father’s unacknowledged son? Which is why he did so much for him, and why you agreed to the match. I think I should like that, if it were true. Brothers like Malcolm are perfectly horrid, but Fulk would be wonderful, just like Alex, and then you would be my sister-by-law as well as my stepdaughter.”
Now there was a rumour fit to get Fulk knifed in the dark. “Why are you here?”
Anne blinked, entirely guileless. “Oh, I am coming with you, of course.”
“No.”
“But”-
“No. I am not having you tag along into a war.”
“I have my own soldiers, nearly fifty men, and my own household and incomes and everything, so I would not be a burden and would be able to help.”
And spy, and heaven know what else. “No. It will not be safe.”
Anne stood up, stuck her chin in the air, and ruined the effort at a mature air by stamping a royal foot. “Then I will follow after you, and you will not be able to stop me unless you shut your gates in my face and drive me off with armed force, and then you would be declaring war on my father too, so you will not. I told you, I want to see the end of this, and I want to help. You need soldiers and money, and I have both. You asked me to help, back at the start of this, and I said I would. You used to trust me; why will you not do so now?”
Eleanor set down the bald truth. “Because you proved yourself unworthy of it.”
Anne spread her hands in a plaintive gesture. “But you are
happy. It was what you wanted!”
“And I have been used as a tool to weaken England and my family, and know I will be used again and again. Fulk and I, we have been thrust into balancing on a pinhead, with death in every direction should we fall. I see no end to that balancing act, so long as we live and whatever we do. You promised to say nothing, and you broke that promise to someone who would obviously use the information against us.”
“I was trying to help.”
“You broke your sworn word.”
Anne took a deep breath. “I will … I will make up for it all to you. You can trust me; I will swear the same oaths you have your followers swear, and I will never dishonour myself again, ever. I am coming with you. I am going to help you.”
Eleanor returned to breakfast with Fulk. He broke some bread off the loaf for her. “Well?”
Eleanor slumped down opposite him. “How do I end in these situations?”
“Probably because you’re a gooseberry, my love.”
“I have a dowager queen sworn in personal loyalty to me, and her maids too. She is following us like a vassal, adding her army to ours. As if I did not have enough dubious people to watch.” With a groan Eleanor buried her face in her hands. “Her family is going to think we have taken her hostage, I know it.”
“I was wrong.” Fulk patted her on the shoulder. “It’s too much trouble for a mere gooseberry. This is the princess at work.”
Everything appears to be working now. I have never had such trouble reinstalling windows, gah! Think I shall be investing in a new primary hard drive soon; it is still sending out delayed write failed messages, and appears to be botching non-critical parts of the windows updates because it won’t copy the information correctly. :sigh: But not for a short while, anyway. I want to recover my sanity after this time first.
Chief Ragusa: No, I don’t enjoy inflicting pain of Jocelyn. I enjoy making him
stressed 
Vital difference there. In pain he grumbles and moans; stressed he runs about in a frantic blur getting up to all kinds of mischief.
It’s common knowledge that Hugh looks nothing like William, and one of the things Trempy has built on in starting his opposition. It’s a bit too noticeable to hide
Welcome, east_emnet. Nell asks me to enquire as to your membership of her club, and says you may join Fulk’s as well if you want.
That gooseberry, so pushy! :froggy gets glared at by her royal shortness: Er, not pushy at all! Wonderful, charming, gentle as a dove, and only thinking of saving you the trouble of forgetting something you clearly intended to do. Yep, that’s it.
Avernite: They do say evil and the craft runs in families, and Malcolm is said to be the spawn of a devil …
Chargone: I never get the email; I have it enabled and the thread subscribed to, and I get the email notification which comes with a new PM. Oh well, nowt so queer as software.
Coz1: That last line of Jocelyn’s made the frog smile as well. It’s good to see him doing something other than whinge and mope about his situation, and start trying to alter it again. He’s been a mess ever since that unpleasant parting with his wife.
Louis! Ah ha! Two years on, and finally you are lured into posting
Is the humour qotient getting back to your liking? It picks up naturally after the wedding.
It was windows :grimaces: It had been decaying for a bit, slowly slipping down the slopes of senility with some hearty kicks from those powercuts I mentioned in this topic, and a few nudges from the occasional delayed write errors. It crashed during the driver install for my new video card (for those who don’t know, my old one was aging and ailing), which you know. You also know I’d fixed that; however it appeared that the failed first install had done a bit more damage to windows. Finally all the instability and glitching got too much to stand, so I reinstalled windows, only to find that suddenly I needed RAID drivers before the installation program could detect my HDs. Finding out why windows wouldn’t detect the drive, and the finding the drivers took two days, slogging away each evening when I returned home from work. It then took 3 days to get windows to activate itself, because Microsoft where having trouble with their network. Without an activated copy of windows most of the necessary and useful updates are blocked.
Fanclub updates:
Trempy: 3 members (getting impatient for the frog to get on with things now. Waiting is undignified, especially when the wait lasts weeks)
Anne: 3 members (Putting the alarms in the phrase “Diverse alarms and excursions”)
Fulk: 9 members (protecting the frog (and the princess talking to her) from Trempy’s menacing)
Nell: 9 members (giving the lucky amphibian a pep talk about writing quicker and dropping all these pointless activities like reading so as to get more done)
Godit: 6 members
Constance: 4 members
Hugh: 2 members
Jocelyn: 8 members (Revelling in his amazing literacy and general educated culturedness)
Richildis: 2 members ( :sigh: )
Miles: 4 members
Hawise: 3 members
Mahaut: 2 member (Yay! Another nice friend to play with! Does this mean she can have a nice new dress to play in, and a spinning top with green and red paint? Pleeeease?)
William: 2 members (Dead. Popular. Dead popular?)
Malcolm Nefastus: 6 members (off torturing puppies, or so everyone would say)
King of Scotland: 2 member
Anti-Trempy: 6 members
Anti-Aveline: 1
Anti-Hugh: 1 member
The frog club: 5 members.
