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Автор Виктория Холт

CHAPTER I

In her apartments at the castle of Plessis-les-Tours a little girl knelt on a window seat and looked disconsolately out on the sunlit grounds. The sunshine out there, she felt, made the castle itself more gloomy by contrast. She hated the place.

‘What am I,’ she said aloud, ‘but a prisoner?’

The lady who was stitching industriously at her embroidery, her back to the window and to the little girl, that the best of the light might fall on her work, clicked her tongue in answer. She had no wish to enter into a discussion of her wrongs with Jeanne, for although the child was only twelve years old, her tongue was so quick that even her tutor had learned not to enter lightly into wordy battles with her, since, with her logic and quick wits, Jeanne had a way of coming out of such encounters victorious. As for Madame de Silly, the Baillive of Caen and governess of Jeanne, she knew herself no match for the child when it came to an argument.

‘I hear the wind howling through the trees in the forest sometimes at night,’ went on Jeanne. ‘Then I think that perhaps it is the souls of those who died in torment before they could make their peace with God. Do you think that is what we hear, Aymée?’

‘Nonsense!’ cried Aymée de Silly. ‘You have just said it was the wind in the trees. ’

‘It is a prison, Aymée. Can you not feel it? Too much misery has been suffered in this place for me to be happy here. Think of those prisoners of my ancestor. Think of the iron cages in which he kept them … so small that they could not move; and there they remained for years. Think of the men who have been tortured in this dark and miserable place. Look out there at the lovely river. Men have been cruelly drowned in that river.

When I go out at dusk, I seem to see the bodies of men hanging on the trees, as they did all those years ago. ’

‘You think too much,’ said Aymée.

‘How can one think too much?’ demanded Jeanne scornfully. ‘I am determined not to stay here. I shall run away and join my mother and father. Why should I be kept from them?’

‘Because it is the will of the King of France. And what do you think would happen were you to run away? If – which, seems hardly likely – you were to have the good fortune to arrive at your father’s court of Navarre, what do you think would happen? I can tell you. You would be sent back here. ’

‘That might not be,’ said Jeanne. ‘If my father, the King of Navarre, were there, he would hide me, since he at least wishes me to be with him. I know it. ’

‘But it is the will of your uncle that you should stay here. And have you forgotten that your uncle is the King of France?’

‘That is something Uncle Francis never lets anyone forget. ’ Jeanne smiled, for in spite of her grievances against him, she loved her uncle. He was handsome and charming and always delightful to her; he was amused rather than angry when she pleaded to be allowed to join her parents, even though she knew it was his wish that she should remain where she was.